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ICONOCLASTS 



BY JAMES HUNEKER 

MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC (1899) 

CHOPIN : THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC (19«0) 

MELOMANIAOS (1902) 

OTERTONES (1904) 

ICONOCLASTS! A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS (IMS 

VISIONARIES (1905) 

egoists: a book of supermen «909) 
promenades of an impressionist (1b10j 
franz liszt. illustrated (1811) 
the pathos of distance (1912) 
new cosmopolis (1915) 

IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS <fl915) 
0NICORNS (1917) 
BEDOUINS (1920) 
STEEPLEJACK (1820) 
VARIATIONS (1921) 
LETTERS (1922) 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



ICONOCLASTS 

A BOOK OF DRAMATISTS 



IBSEN, STRINDBERG, BECQUE, HAUPTMANN, 

SUDERMANN, HERVIEU, GORKY, DUSE AND 

D'ANNUNZIO, MAETERLINCK AND BERNARD SHAW 



BY 



JAMES HUNEKER 

n 



My truth is the truth 

Max Stirmkr 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1922 



?h/loV5J 

.Hi 
lua. 



COPYMOHT, 1905, BT 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Printed in the United States of America 



Published March, 1905 

1H4J k If* 




TO 

JOHN FRANCIS HUNEKER 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Henrik Ibsen , i 

II. August Strindberg 139 

III. Henry Becque 163 

IV. Gerhart Hauptmann 182 

V. Paul Hervieu .211 

VI. The Quintessence of Shaw . . 233 

VII. Maxim Gorky's Nachtasyl 269 

VIII. Hermann Sudermann 286 

IX. Princess Mathilde's Play 304 

X. Duse and D'Annunzio 320 

XI. VlLLIERS DE L'lSLE ADAM . 350 

XII. Maurice Maeterlinck ........ . 367 



vii 



I 

HENRIK IBSEN 
I 

THE INDIVIDUALIST 
The Kingdom of God is within you 

I 

Ferdinand Brunetiere has declared that 
" there can be no tragedy without a struggle ; 
nor can there be genuine emotion for the spec- 
tator unless something other and greater than 
life is at stake." This so exactly defines the 
dramas of Henrik Ibsen that it might have 
been specifically written to describe their dra- 
matic and ethical content. Whatever else 
Ibsen's works may be, they are first soul dra- 
mas ; the human soul is not only their shadowy 
protagonist, but it is the stake for which his 
characters breathlessly game throughout the 
vast halls of his poetic and historic plays and 
within those modern middle-class apartments, 
where the atmosphere seems rarefied by the 
intensity of the struggle. " Greater than life " 
means for Ibsen the immortal soul — immortal 
not in the theologic, but generic sense ; the soul 
of the species, which never had a beginning 
and never can have an end. With this precious 
i 



ICONOCLASTS 

entity as pawn on Ibsen's dramatic chess-board, 
the Brunetiere dictum is perfectly fulfilled. 

Let us apply to him and his plays a symbol ; 
let us symbolize the arch-symbolist. Ibsen is 
an open door The door enacts an important 
rdle with him. Nora Helmer, in A Doll's 
House, goes out of the door to her new life, and 
in The Master Builder, Hilda Wangel, typifying 
the younger generation, enters to Solness. An 
open door on the chamber of the spirit is Ibsen. 
Through it we view the struggle of souls in 
pain and doubt and wrath. He himself has 
said that the stage should be considered as a 
room with the fourth wall knocked down so 
that the spectators could see what is going on 
within the enclosure. A tragic wall is this miss- 
ing one, for between the listener and the actor 
there is interposed the soul of the playwright, the 
soul of Ibsen, which, prism-like, permits us to 
witness the refractions of his art. This open 
door, this absent barrier, is it not a symbol ? 

What does Henrik Ibsen mean to his cen- 
tury ? Is he dramatist, symbolist, idealist, opti- 
mist, pessimist, poet, or realist? Or is he a 
destructive, a corroding force? Has he con- 
structive gifts — aside from his technical genius? 
He has been called an anarchic preacher. He 
has been described as a debaser of the moral 
coin. He has been ranged far from the angels, 
and his very poetic gifts have been challenged. 
Yet the surface pessimism of his plays conceals 
a mighty belief in the ultimate goodness of 

2 



HENRIK IBSEN 

mankind. Realist as he is, his dramas are shot 
through with a highly imaginative symbolism. 
A Pegasus was killed early under him, as Georg 
Brandes says ; but there remains a rich rem- 
nant of poesy. And may there not be deduced 
from his complete compositions a constructive 
philosophy that makes for the ennoblement of 
his fellow-beings ? 

Ibsen is a reflective poet, one to whom the 
idea presents itself before the picture; with 
Shakespeare and Goethe the idea and form 
were simultaneously born. His art is great and 
varied, yet it is never exercised as a sheer play 
of form or colour or wit. A Romantic originally, 
he pays the tax to Beauty by his vivid symbol- 
ism and his rare formal perfections. And a 
Romantic is always a revolutionist. Embittered 
in youth — proud, self-contained, reticent — he 
waged war with life for over a half-century ; 
fought for his artistic ideals as did Richard 
Wagner; and, like Wagner, he has swept the 
younger generation along with him. He, the 
greatest moral artist of his century, Tolstoy not 
excepted, was reviled for what he had not said 
or done — so difficult was it to apprehend his 
new, elusive method. A polemist he is, as were 
Byron and Shelley, Tolstoy and Dickens, Tur- 
genev and Dostoievsky. Born a Northman, he 
is melancholic, though not veritably pessimistic 
of temperament ; moral indignation in him must 
not be confounded with the pessimism that sees 
no future hope for mankind. The North breeds 
3 



ICONOCLASTS 

mystics. Shakespeare would have made his 
Hamlet a Scandinavian even if the legendary 
Hamlet and the earlier play had not existed. 
The brief, white nights, the chilly climate, the 
rugged, awful scenery, react on sensitive natures 
like Ibsen's. And then the various strains in 
his blood should not be forgotten, — Danish, 
German, Norwegian, and Scotch. Thus we get 
a gamut of moods, — philosophic, poetic, mystic, 
and analytic. And if he too frequently depicts 
pathologic states, is it not the fault of his epoch ? 
Few dramatists have been more responsive to 
their century. 

II 

The drama is the domain of logic and will; 
Henry Becque called it " the art of sacrifices." 
The Ibsen technic is rather tight in the social 
dramas, but the larger rhythms are nowhere 
missing. The most artificial of art forms, the 
drama, is in his hands a mirror of many rever- 
berating lights. The transubstantiation of reali- 
ties is so smoothly accomplished that one 
involuntarily remembers Whistler's remark as 
to art being only great when all traces of the 
means used are vanished. Ibsen's technic is a 
means to many ends. It is effortless in the 
later plays — it is the speech of emotion, the 
portrayal of character. " Qui dit drame, dit 
caractere," writes Andre" Gide. Ibsen's content 
conditions his form. His art is the result of 
constraint. He respects the unities of time, 
4 



HENRIK IBSEN 

place, action, not that he admires the pseudo- 
classic traditions of Boileau, but because the 
rigorous excision of the superfluous suits his 
scheme. Nor is he an extremist in this question 
of the unities. Like Renan, the artist in him 
abhors " the horrible mania of certitude." The 
time-unit in his best plays ranges from one to 
two days ; the locality is seldom shifted further 
than from room to garden. As he matured his 
theatrical canvas shrank, the number of his 
characters diminished. Even the action became 
less vivacious and various; the exteriorization 
of emotional states was substituted for the 
bustling, vigorous life of the earlier plays. Yet 

— always drama, dynamic not static. 

His dialogue — a spoken, never a literary one 

— varies from extreme naturalism to the half- 
uttered sentences, broken phrases, and exclama- 
tions that disclose — as under a burning light 

— the sorrow and pain of his men and women. 
One recalls in reading the later pieces the say- 
ing of Maurice Barres, " For an accomplished 
spirit there is but one dialogue — that between 
our two egos — the momentary ego that we are 
and the ideal one toward which we strive." 
The Ibsen plays are character symphonies. 
His polyphonic mastery of character is unique 
in the history of the drama ; for, as we shall 
presently show, there is a second — nay, a third 

— intention in his dialogue that give forth end- 
less repercussions of ideas and emotions. 

The mental intensity of Ibsen is relentless, 
5 



ICONOCLASTS 

Once, Arthur Symons showing Rodin some 
Blake drawings, told the French sculptor, " Blake 
used literally to see these figures ; they are not 
mere inventions." — "Yes," replied Rodin, "he 
saw them once; he should have seen them 
three or four times." Ibsen's art presents no 
such wavering vision. He saw his characters 
not once but for many months continuously 
before, Paracelsus-like, he allowed them an 
escape from his chemical retort to the footlights. 
Some of them are so powerfully realized that 
their souls shine like living torches. 

Ibsen's symbolism is that of Baudelaire, " All 
nature is a temple filled with living pillars, and 
the pillars have tongues and speak in confused 
words, and man walks as through a forest of 
countless symbols." The dramatist does not 
merely label our appetites and record our man- 
ners, but he breaks down the barrier of flesh, 
shows the skeleton that upholds it, and makes a 
sign by which we recognize, not alone the poet 
in the dramatist, but also the god within us. 
The " crooked sequence of life " has its speech 
wherewith truth may be imaged as beauty. Ib- 
sen loves truth more than beauty, though he does 
not ignore the latter, With him a symbol is an 
image and not an abstraction. It is not the 
* pure idea, barren and unadorned, but the idea 
clothed by an image which flashes a signal upon 
our consciousness. Technically we know that 
the Norwegian dramatist employs his symbols 
as a means of illuminating the devious acts and 
6 



HENRIK IBSEN 

speech of his humans, binding by repetitions 
the disparate sections and contrasted motives of 
his play. These symbols are not always leading 
motives, though they are often so construed; 
his leit-motiven are to be sought rather in the 
modulation of character and the characteristic 
gestures which express it. With Rosmersholm 
the " white horses " indicate by an image the 
dark forces of heredity which operate in the 
catastrophe. The gold and green forest in 
Little Eyolf is a symbol of what Rita Allmers 
brought her husband Alfred, and the resultant 
misery of a marriage to which the man, through 
a mistaken idealism, had sold himself. There 
are such symbols and catchwords in every play. 
In Emperor and Galilean the conquering sun is 
a symbol for Julian the Apostate, whose destiny, 
he believes, is conducted by the joyous sun; while 
in Ghosts the same sun is for the agonized Os- 
wald Alving the symbol of all he has lost, — 
reason, hope, and happiness. Thus the tower 
in The Master Builder, the open door in A Doll's 
House, the ocean in The Lady from the Sea, give 
a homogeneity which the otherwise loose struc- 
ture of the drama demands. The Ibsen play 
is always an organic whole. 

It must not be forgotten that Henrik Ibsen, 
who was born in 1828, — surely under the sign 
of Saturn! — had passed through the flaming 
revolutionary epoch of 1848, when the lyric pes- 
simism of his youthful poems was transformed 
into bitter denunciations of authority. He was 
7 



ICONOCLASTS 

regarded as a dangerous man ; and while he may 
not have indulged in any marked act of rebel- 
lion, his tendencies were anarchic — a relic of 
his devotion to the French Revolution. But 
then he was a transcendentalist and an intellec- 
tual anarch. If he called the State the enemy 
of the individual, it was because he foresaw the 
day when the State might absorb the man. He 
advocated a bloodless revolution; it must be 
spiritual to compass victory. Unless men willed 
themselves free, there could be no real freedom. 
" In those days there was no King in Israel; 
every man did that which was right in his own 
eyes." Ibsen confessed that the becoming was 
better than the being — a touch of Renan and 
his beloved fieri. He would have agreed with 
Emerson, who indignantly exclaimed, " Is it 
not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a 
unit ; not to be reckoned one character ; not to 
yield that peculiar fruit which each man was 
created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, 
in the hundred of thousand, of the party, the 
section to which we belong, and our opinion 
predicted geographically as the North or the 
South ? " Lord Acton's definition that " Liberty 
is not a means to a higher political end. It is 
in itself the highest political end," would have 
pleased Ibsen. " The minority is always in the 
right," he asserts, 

The Ibsen plays are a long litany praising the 
man who wills. The weak man must be edu- 
cated. Be strong, not as the "blond roaming 
8 



HENRIK IBSEN 

beast " of Nietzsche, but as captain of your own 
soul's citadel ! Remy de Gourmont sees the idea 
of liberty as an emphatic deformation of the 
idea of privilege. Good is an accident produced 
by man at the price of terrible labour. Nature 
has no mercy. Is there really free will ? Is it 
not one of the most seductive forms of the uni- 
versal fiction ? True, answers in effect Ibsen ; 
heredity controls our temperaments, the dead 
rule our actions, yet let us act as if we are truly 
free. Adjuring Brand "To thyself be true," 
while Peer Gynt practises " To thyself be suffi- 
cient," Ibsen proves in the case of the latter 
that Will, if it frees, also kills. Life is no longer 
an affair of the tent and tribe. The crook of a 
man's finger may upset a host, so interrelated 
is the millet-seed with the star. A poet of affir- 
mations, he preaches in his thunder-harsh voice 
as did Comte, " Submission is the base of per- 
fection " ; but this submission must be voluntary. 
The universal solvent is Will. Work is not the 
only panacea. Philosophically, Ibsen stands here 
between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche ; he has 
belief in the Will, though not the Frankfort 
philosopher's pessimism ; and the Will to Power 
of Nietzsche without that rhapsodist's lyric ec- 
stasy. Nietzsche asked: " For what is freedom ? 
To have the will to be responsible for one's self." 
Ibsen demonstrates that a great drama must 
always have a great philosophic substratum. 
There may be no design in nature — let us be- 
lieve there is. Gesture is the arrest of the flux, 
9 



ICONOCLASTS 

rendering visible the phenomena of life, for it 
moderates its velocity. In this hypothesis he 
would not be at variance with De Gourmont, who 
has not hesitated to ask whether intelligence 
itself is not an accident in the creative processes, 
and if it really be the goal toward which man- 
kind finally believes itself drifting. 

There is the mystic as well as the realistic 
chord in the Ibsen drama. His Third Kingdom, 
not of the flesh (Pagan) nor of the spirit (Chris- 
tian), yet partaking of both, has a ring of Hegel 
and also of that abbot of Flores called Joachim, 
who was a mediaeval Franciscan. The grandilo- 
quent silhouettes of the Romantic drama, the 
mouthers of rhetoric, the substitution of a bric- 
a-brac mirage for reality, have no place in 
Ibsen's art. For this avoidance of the banal 
he has been called a perverter of the heroic. 
His characters are in reality the bankruptcy of 
stale heroisms; he replaces the old formula 
with a new, vital one — Truth at all hazards. 
He discerns a Fourth Dimension of the spirit. 
He has said that if mankind had time to think, 
there would be a new world. This opposer of 
current political and moral values declares that 
reality is itself a creation of art — each indi- 
vidual creates his picture of the world. An 
idealist he is in the best sense of the word, 
though some critics, after reading into the plays 
Socialism — picture Ibsen and " regimentation," 
as Huxley dubbed it ! — claim the sturdy individ- 
ualist as a mere unmasker of conventionalism 
10 



HENRIK IBSEN 

How far all this is from Ibsen's intention — 
who is much more than a satirist ! and social 
reformer — may be seen in his Brand, with its 
austere watchword, " All or Nothing." A 
prophet and a seer he is, not a glib socialist 
exposing municipal evils and offering ready-made 
prophylactics. The curve of Ibsen's art com- 
prises all these petty minor evils of life, it reaches 
across the edge of the human soul ; while, ardent 
pilgrim that he is, he slowly mounts to the peaks 
from which he may see his Third Kingdom. 
But, like a second Moses, he has never de- 
scended into that country of ineffable visions 
or trod its broad and purifying landscapes. 

Max Stirner's racu^u.. fi.tad defiant egoism, 
expressed in his pithy axiom, " My truth is the 
truth," might be answered by Ibsen with the 
contradictory " Le moi est hai'ssable" of Pascal. 
Indeed, an ironic self-contradiction may be 
gleaned from a study of Ibsen ; each play seems 
to deny the conclusions of the previous one. 
But when the entire field is surveyed in retro- 
spect the smaller irregularities and deflections 
from the level melt into a harmonious picture. 
Ibsen is complex. Ibsen is confusing. In 
Ibsen there rage the thinker, the artist, the 
critic. These sometimes fail to amalgamate, 
and so the artistic precipitation is cloudy. He 
is a true Viking who always loves stormy 
weather ; and, as Brandes said, " God is in his 
heart, but the devil is in his body." His is 
an emotional logic, if one may frame such an 
II 



ICONOCLASTS 

expression ; and it would be in vain to search in 
his works for the ataraxia of the tranquil Greek 
philosopher. A dynamic grumbler, like Car- 
lyle, he eventually contrives to orient himself ; 
his dramas are only an escape from the ugly 
labyrinth of existence. If his characters are 
sick, so is latter-day life. The thinker often 
overrides the poet in him ; and at times the 
dramatist, the pure Theatermensch, gets the bit 
between his teeth and nearly wrecks the psy- 
chologist. He acknowledges the existence of 
evil in the world, knows the house of evil, but 
has not tarried in it. Good must prevail in the 
end is the burden of his message, else he would 
not urge upon his fellow-beings the necessity of 
willing and doing. 

The cold glamour of his moods is supple- 
mented by the strong, sincere purpose underly- 
ing them. He feels, with Kierkegaard, that the 
average sensual man will ever " parry the ethi- 
cal claim " ; and if, in Flaubert's eyes, " man is 
bad because he is stupid," in Ibsen's " he is 
stupid because he is bad." " To will is to have 
to will," says his Maximus in Emperor and 
Galilean. This phrase is the capstone of the 
Ibsen structure. If he abhors the inflated 
phraseology of altruism, he is one with Herbert 
Spencer, who spoke of a relapse into egotism 
as the only thing which could make altruism 
enduring. 

Felicity, then, with Ibsen is experience itself, 
not the result of experience. Life is a huge 

12 



HENRIK IBSEN 

misunderstanding, and the Ibsen dramas hinge 
on misunderstandings — the conflict between the 
instinctive and the acquired, between the forces 
of heredity and of environment. Herein lies his 
preference for the drama of disordered wills. 
And touching on this accusation of morbidity 
and sickness, may there not be gleaned from 
Shakespeare and Goethe many mad, half-mad, 
and brain-sick men and women ? The English 
poet's plays are a perfect storehouse of examples 
for the alienist. Hallucination that hardens into 
mania is delicately recorded by Ibsen ; he notes 
with a surgeon's skilled eye the first slight de- 
cadence and the final entombment of the will. 
Furthermore, the chiefest malady of our age is 
that of the will enfeebled by lack of exercise, by 
inanition due to unsound education ; and as he 
fingers our spiritual muscles he cries aloud their 
fiabbiness. In men the pathologic symptoms 
are more marked than in women; hence the 
number of women in his dramas who assume 
dominant roles — not that Ibsen has any par- 
ticular sympathy with the New Woman, but be- 
cause he has seen that the modern woman marks 
time better with the Zeitgeist than her male com- 
plement. 

Will, even though your will be disastrous in its 
outcome, but will, he insists ; and yet demonstrates 
that only through self-surrender can come com- 
plete self-realization. To say " I am what I am," 
is the Ibsen credo ; but this " /" must be tested 
in the fire of self-abnegation. To the average 
13 



ICONOCLASTS 

theologian all this rings suspiciously like the old 
fashioned doctrine of salvation by good works. 
The Scotch leaven is strong in Ibsen. In his 
bones he is a moralist, in practice an artist. His 
power is that of the artist doubled by the pro- 
found moralist, the philosopher doubled by the 
dramatist; the crystallization in the plays of 
these antagonistic qualities constitutes the tri- 
umph of his genius. 



Ill 

The stage is Ibsen's pulpit, but he is first the 
artist ; his moral, as in all great drama, is im- 
plicit. He is a doubter ; he often answers a 
question with another question ; and if he builds 
high he also digs deep. His plays may be 
broadly divided into three phases. First we get 
the national-romantic ; second, the historical ; 
third, the social dramas of revolt. In the first, 
under the influence of fable and folk-song, Ibsen 
delved into the roots of Scandinavia's past ; then 
follow the stirring dramas, Fru Inger of Ostraat, 
The Vikings at Helgeland, The Pretenders, and 
those two widely contrasted epics, Brand and 
Peer Gynt. Beginning with The Young Men's 
League and ending with the dramatic epilogue, 
When We Dead Awake, the third period is cov- 
ered. And what range, versatility, observation, 
poetic imagination, intellectual power ! Yet 
this dramatist has been called provincial ! Pro- 
vincial — when his maiden tragedy, Catilina, 
14 



HENRIK IBSEN 

begins B.C. and his epilogue ends the nineteenth 
century ; when his characters are types as well 
as individuals that exist from South to North. 
True man of the North, he sought in Italy for 
his scene of action, his first hero. That his men 
and women are strongly Norwegian is no impu- 
tation of provincialism — Christiania is a world 
capital, Scandinavia is not a Bceotia. And is 
not human nature composed of the same soul- 
stuff the world over ? A similar accusation 
might be easily brought against French, Eng- 
lish, and German drama. Not for the sake of 
the phrase did' M. Faguet salute Ibsen as " the 
greatest psychological dramatist since the time 
of Racine." And remember that Faguet is a 
Frenchman loyal to the art traditions of his race, 
— logic, order, clarity of motive, and avoidance 
of cloudy dramatic symbolism. 

There are at least three factors to be noted in 
the Ibsen plays — the play qua play, that is, the 
drama for the sake of its surface intrigue, with 
its painting of manner and character ; the more 
ulterior meanings and symbolism ; and lastly, 
the ideologic factor, really the determining one. 
M. Jules Gaultier, a young French thinker, has 
evolved from the novels of Gustave Flaubert — 
greatest master of philosophic fiction — a meta- 
physic which is very engaging. Bovaryisme he 
denominates the tendency in humanity to appear 
other than it is. This trait has been dealt with 
by all world novelists and satirists ; Bovaryisme 
has elevated it to the dignity of a Universal 
15 



ICONOCLASTS 

Fiction. We pretend to be that which we are 
not It is the law of being, the one mode by 
which life is enabled to vary and escape the 
typic monotony of the species. It is the self- 
dupery of the race. We are all snobs of the 
Infinite, parvenus of the Eternal. We are 
doomed to dissemble, else perish as a race. 

Now, apply the laws of biology to the moral 
world and you have the perfect flowering of the 
application in the Ibsen drama. The basic clash 
of character is that between species and individ- 
ual. Each drama furnishes an illustration. In 
Rosmersholm we see Johann Rosmer — the last 
of the Rosmers, himself personifying the law of 
heredity — endeavouring to escape this iron law 
and perishing in the attempt. He drags down 
with him Rebekka West, who because of her 
tendency to variability, in an evolutionary sense, 
might have developed ; but the Rosmer ideals 
poisoned her fresher nature. Halvard Solness, 
the Master Builder, suffers from his tyrannical 
conscience — nearly all of Ibsen's characters 
have a morbid conscience — and not even the 
spiritual lift of that exotic creature, Hilda Wan- 
gel, can save him from his fate. He attempts 
to go beyond the law and limits of his being, 
and his will fails. But is it not better to fall 
from his giddy height than remain a builder of 
happy homes and churches ? From her birth 
neurotic Hedda Gabler is hopelessly flawed in 
her moral nature. She succumbs to the first 
pressure of adverse circumstance. She, too, i* 
16 



HENRIK IBSEN 

not ripe for spiritual re-birth. Nora Helmer, 
like Hilda Wangel, like Mrs. Alving, frees her- 
self by her variation from what we, in our 
ignorance of our own possibilities, call the 
normal. It is a cardinal doctrine of Ibsen that 
we alone can free ourselves ; help can never 
come from without. This he demonstrates by 
his ironical flaying of the busybody reformer 
and idealist, Greger Werle, in The Wild Duck. 
Ibsen also presents here the reverse of the Ibsen 
medal. Ekdal, the photographer, who is utterly 
worthless, a fantastic liar and masquerader, like 
Peer Gynt, is not saved by the interference of 
Werle — quite the contrary; tragedy is sum- 
moned through this same Werle's intrusion, and 
that most pathetic figure, Hedwig Ekdal, might 
have striven to self-realization had not her 
young existence been snuffed out by a virtuous 
lie. Hilda Wangel is the incarnation of the 
new order, Rosmersholm of the old. And, les 
femmeSy ces etres mediocres et magiques, as Jules 
Laforgue calls them, the women of Ibsen usually 
manage to evade the consequences of the life-lie 
better than the men. The secret is that, nearer 
nature, they instinctively will to live with more 
intensity of purpose. Sir Oliver Lodge thinks 
that the conflict between Free Will and Deter- 
minism is because we "ignore the fact that there 
must be a subjective partition in the universe 
separating the region of which we have some 
inkling of knowledge from the region of which 
we have none." It must be that reservoir of 
17 



ICONOCLASTS 

eternal certitudes for which Maurice Maeterlinck 
sighs. The unknown, the subliminal forces la* 
das, have their share in the control of our will, 
though we may only judge of what we see on 
this side of the "misty region" of metaphysic. 
Be this as it may, Ibsen is content to set his 
puppets acting within the appreciable limits of 
free will allowed us by our cognition. 

If this evolutionary foundation of the Ibsen 
drama be too deep, there is also the dialogue, 
externally simple, terse, natural, forcible, and 
in the vernacular replete with sonority, colour, 
and rhythm. Yet it is a stumbling-block; be- 
neath the dramatist's sentences are pools of 
uncertainty. This is the so-called " interior " or 
" secondary " dialogue. The plays, read in the 
illuminating sense of their symbolism, become 
other and more perplexing engines of power. 
They are spiritual palimpsests, through which 
may be dimly deciphered the hieroglyphics of 
another soul-continent We peer into them like 
crystal-gazers and see the faint outlines of our- 
selves, but so seemingly distorted as to evoke a 
shudder. Or is our ill-suppressed horror in the 
presence of these haunting shapes of humanity 
the result of ignorance ? The unknown is always 
disquieting. Hippolyte Taine may be right. 
" Our inborn human imperfection is part of the 
order of things, like the constant deformation 
of the petal in a plant." And perhaps to Ibsen, 
who is ever the dramatist, the lover of dramatic 
effects, should be granted the license of the 

18 

v 



HENRIK IBSEN 

character painter. To heighten the facts of life 
is a prime office of the playwright. 

But he has widened by his synthesis the do 
main of the theatre ; he has brought to it new 
material for assimilation ; he, in a technical sense, 
has accomplished miracles by transposing hope- 
lessly undramatic ideas to the boards, and by 
his indomitable tenacity has transmuted them 
into viable dramatic events and characters. 
Every piece of Ibsen can be played ; even Peer 
Gynt and its forty scenic changes. It has been 
played — with its epic fantasy, humour, irony, 
tenderness, and philosophy ; Peer Gynt, the very 
picture of the modern inconstant man, his spirit- 
ual fount arid, his imagination riotous, his con- 
science nily rank his ideals, his dodging along 
the line of least moral resistance, his compro- 
mising with every reality of life — this Peer 
Gynt is the very symbol of our shallow, callous, 
and material civilization. 

In all the conflicting undertow of his temper- 
ament and intellect, Ibsen has maintained his 
equilibrium. He is his own Brand, a heaven- 
stormer; his own Skule, the kingly self-mis- 
truster, and his own Solness, the doubter of 
himself cowed by the thoughts of the new gen- 
eration — personified in August Strindberg and 
Gerhart Hauptmann. The old and the new 
meet at a tumultuous apex of art at once grim, 
repellent, morose, emotional, unsocial, masterful, 
and gripping. And what an art ! What an ant- 
hill of struggling, impotent humanity he has 
19 



ICONOCLASTS 

exposed ! What riches for the comedians — 
those ever admirable exponents of Bovaryisme ! 
They pass us slowly by, this array of Ibsen men 
and women, with anguish in their eyes, their 
features convulsed and tortured into revealing 
their most secret shames by their cruel master. 
They pass us slowly, this motley mob, with hyp- 
notic beckoning gestures and piteous pleading 
glances, for their souls will be presently spilled 
by their implacable creator. Lady Inger, her 
son dead, her daughter distraught ; revengeful 
Hjordis and bewitched Sigurd ; Duke Skule, 
fearing Hakon's divine right to the throne; 
Svanhilda freeing Falk as she goes to her 
martyr marriage with the unloved Gulsted ; 
Brand, a new Adam, sacrificing wife and child 
to his fetich, " All or Nothing " ; fascinating, in- 
constant Peer Gynt ; Emperor Julian, that mag- 
nificent failure ; the grotesque Steensgard ; the 
whited sepulchre, Consul Bernick ; Nora and 
her self-satisfied Helmer; Oswald Alving and 
his agonized mother; the doughty Stockmann, 
who declares that the exceptional man stands 
ever alone ; Gina, the homely sensible, and 
Ekdal, the self -illusionist ; Rebekka West and 
JohannRosmer; EllidaWangel and the Stranger; 
Hedda and Loevborg ; Hilda and Solness ; Asta 
and Rita Allmers ; John Gabriel Borkman, his 
gloomy brows furrowed by thoughts of ven- 
geance, accused by Ella Rentheim, whose soul 
he has let slip from his keeping ; Rubek and 
Irene, the tragedy of the artist who sacrifices 
20 



HENRIK IBSEN 

love for art ; and the entire cohort of subsidiary 
characters, each one personal and alive — is not 
this small world, this pictured life, a most elo- 
quent witness to the fecundity of the northern 
Rembrandt ! He proclaims that " The Kingdom 
of God is within you"; Tolstoy has preached 
the like. But between the depressing quietism 
of the Russian and the crescent individualism 
of the Norwegian there lies the gulf separating 
East and West. Tolstoy faces the past. Ibsen 
confronts the future. 

II 

YOUTHFUL PLAYS AND POEMS 

Students of Ibsen are deeply indebted to Mr. 
William Archer, not alone for his translations 
— colourless though they often are — but also 
for his illuminative critical articles on the Nor- 
wegian master. A comparatively recent one 
describes Ibsen's apprenticeship and destroys 
the notion that he owed anything to George 
Sand. He learned much of his stagecraft from 
Eugene Scribe, who was the artistic parent of 
Sardou. But as Mr. Archer wrote in an Eng- 
lish periodical: — 

If the French are determined to claim some share 
in the making of Ibsen, they must shift their ground 
a little. He did not get his ideas from George 
Sand, but he got a good deal of his stagecraft from 
Eugene Scribe and the playwrights of his school. 
21 



ICONOCLASTS 

Ideas he could not possibly get from Scribe, for the 
best of all reasons ; but he can be proved to have 
been familiar, at the outset of his career, with the 
works of that great inventor and manipulator of sit- 
uations, from whom there can be little doubt that 
he acquired the rudiments of dramatic construction. 
He ultimately outgrew his teacher, even in technical 
skill, and his later plays, from Ghosts onward, show 
the influence of Scribe mainly in the careful avoid- 
ance of his methods. Nevertheless it was in the 
Scribe gymnasium, so to speak, that he trained him- 
self for his subsequent feats as a technician. 

It is significant of Ibsen's frame of mind in 
his extreme youth, that his first drama was 
called Catilina (1850) and devoted to the Ro- 
man champion of individual rights, the hater of 
tyrants. He studied, says his biographer Hans 
Jaeger, Sallust's Catiline and Cicero's Orations 
against Catiline ; and Vasenius is quoted to the 
effect that the Catilina of Ibsen is " a true rep- 
resentation of the historic personage" — an 
opinion in which Jaeger does not coincide. 
Two women, Aurelia and Furia, who dispute 
for the possession of the hero, are the two 
women natures that may be found in nearly 
all of the dramas. It is not the purpose of this 
study to dwell long upon the plays not in the 
regular repertory. Chiefly for the historic ret- 
rospect are they mentioned ; particularly in the 
case of Catilina, the first as it sounds the key 
in which the master works of the poet are 
generally sounded, the key of individuality, 
22 



HENRIK IBSEN 

"the utmost clearness of vision and fulness 
of power," to employ Ibsen's own words. 

Twenty-six poems appeared in a slim volume. 
They are boyish, one dating from the nine- 
teenth year of the author. They are immature, 
as might be expected, though charged with pes- 
simism, a youthful Byronism. " He went about 
Grimstad like an enigma secured with seven 
seals," said a lady who knew him then. 

The Warriors' Tomb ; Norma, or a Politi- 
cian's Love, — this latter a musical tragedy ; St. 
John's Night, need not occupy our time, for the 
curious Jaeger and Georg Brandes tell all there 
is to be told. St. John's Night, though unpub- 
lished, was produced at the Bergen Theatre, 
January 2, 1853. 

The writer confesses to deep admiration for 
Fru Inger of Ostraat (1857) and The Pre- 
tenders (1864), both translated by Mr. Archer. 
Dealing as they do with historical figures they 
must be of necessity interesting to Norwegians. 
Considered purely as stage plays they appeal, 
particularly Lady Inger, a Lady Macbeth in 
her power for evil. Nils Lykke, too, is firmly 
drawn and is fascinating in his ambitions and 
debaucheries. There is one big scene in which 
the pair meet, which does not soon leave the 
memory. We seem to see in The Pretenders 
" the Great King's thoughts " of Skule, the germ 
of Julian's character, so magnificently exposed 
in Emperor and Galilean. The Pretenders is 
full of barbaric colour and the shock of arms 
23 



ICONOCLASTS 

home episodes recall in atmosphere those won. 
derful scenes in Wagner's Gotterdammerung 
with their hoarse-throated and bloody-minded 
thanes. 

I was lucky enough to be present at the 
revival of this epical composition at Berlin in 
the Neues Theatre, October, 1904. Previous to 
this the Meiningen organization had presented 
the piece in a worthy manner, and once at 
the Schiller Theatre there had been a few 
representations. I was amazed at the power 
and verisimilitude of Ibsen's characters up to 
the death scene — rather a theatrical one — of 
the wicked Bishop Nikolas. After that the 
action became, because of the weak inter- 
pretation of Duke Skule by Franz Wullner, 
uninteresting. And then, too, the fatiguing 
lengths ; nearly five hours were consumed in 
this noteworthy performance. Director Max 
Reinhardt was a subtly wicked ecclesiastic, 
Friedrich Kanzler the heroic King Hakon. 
Die Kronpratendenten, like Wagner's Ring, 
should be given in sections. At the Neues 
Theatre it was splendidly mounted, though it is 
doubtful if it ever will be a popular drama in 
Germany. 

The Feast at Solhaug (1857) was a success 
when it was played at Bergen. Jaeger says 
that Olaf Lijekrans, his next but unprinted 
drama, is more romantic than its predecessor. 
St. John's Night is redolent of folk-song, and 
the lyric prevails in nearly all the earlier work; 
24 



HENRIK IBSEN 

but prose dominates in the three historical 
dramas, the third being The Vikings at Hel- 
geland, considered elsewhere. 

When Henrik Ibsen celebrated his seventieth 
birthday, the Berlin Press Society, as an intro- 
duction to the celebration, had an Ibsen premiere, 
at which his early drama, The Warriors' Tomb, 
was recited. This piece exhibits him not as 
the psychological but as the romantic poet, 
in his twenty-second year. He wrote the work 
in 1850 while he was a poor student in Chris- 
tiania. It was written immediately after Cati 
lina, and was performed on the stage at 
Christiania on September 26 of the same year. 
When Ibsen became stage manager of the. 
Bergen Theatre a revised version of the play 
was given, January 2, 1854. A local newspaper 
printed it as a feuilleton, but every copy of that 
paper has vanished, and The Warriors' Tomb 
exists only in two prompter's copies, one in 
Christiania, the other in Bergen. The latter 
is the one which he regards as the authorized 
version. 

The piece is in verse and has a good move- 
ment and swing in it. It may be called a dram- 
atized ballad, and treats of the last great struggle 
between Heathendom and Christendom. Stu- 
dents of English history know how the Saxons 
wiped out Christianity from the Roman provinces 
they conquered, except in a petty mountainous 
district in Wales, and how a second wave of 
invaders ruined the Celtic church of Ireland 
25 



ICONOCLASTS 

and the Celtic church of Iona, and founded an 
empire in Russia. It seemed indeed as if the 
men who went to death hoping to drink mead in 
Valhalla, would drive back those who went to 
battle hoping to sing hymns among the cher- 
ubim. It is with this period of the world's 
history that Ibsen's juvenile play is occupied. 

King Gandalf and his men sail to Sicily to 
avenge the death of his father, who had fallen 
in a Viking raid. There the rough wielder of 
the sword meets the Christian maiden Blanca, 
and is conquered by her. The word "forgive- 
ness " overcomes him. He has sworn to die or 
be revenged, so now resolves to die. Then he 
recognizes in a Christian hermit the father whom 
he had believed to be dead. He buries only 
his sword and his Viking spirit in the tomb of 
warriors. 

The language of the piece is decidedly juve- 
nile, and the whole of no dramatic importance, 
yet it exhibits traces of the dramatic Viking of 
to-day. In an address delivered at the Press 
Society's meeting, Dr. Julius Elias points out 
that it contains another Ibsen motive, "the 
ethical mission of woman." In the Lady of 
Ostraat, Ibsen's character, Nils Lykke, says, " A 
woman is the most powerful thing on earth ; in 
her hands it lies to lead the man where God 
would have him," and here Gandalf referring to 
an old saga says : — 

'Tis said that to Valfather's share belongs 
Only one-half of the slain warrior ; 
26 



HENRIK IBSEN 

The other half falls into Freia's lot. 
This saying I could never understand, 
But now I grasp it. A slain warrior 
Am I myself — and the best half of me 
Belongs to Freia. 

And Blanca leads Gandalf where God would 
have him ; by her the rude sea-king has his 
moral feelings touched, the heathen becomes a 
Christian, the sea-rover a spiritual champion. 
She tells him that the Northland that set out 
over the ocean to conquer the world with fire 
and sword is called to "deeds of the spirit on 
the sea of thought." 

Dr. Wicksteed in his invaluable lectures on 
Henrik Ibsen gives his readers some specimen 
translations in prose of the poem. They deal, 
in the main, with those themes dear to Tolstoy 
and Zola, — The Miner, Afraid of the Light, 
The Torpedo and the Ark, Burnt Ships, The 
Eider Duck — in this famous lyric as bitter- 
sweet as Heine's, Ibsen prefigured his own 
flight from his native land to the South. We 
are told by some that Ibsen was a man aloof from 
his country, a hater of its institutions. No man, 
not even Bjornson, has been more patriotic. 
He has loved his Norway so well that he has 
seen her faults and has not hesitated to lay on 
the lash. He loves the people quite as much as 
Tolstoy his peasants ; but he would have them 
stand each man on his feet. Like Brand he has 
essayed to lead them to the heights, and never 
has gone down to their level. 
27 



ICONOCLASTS 

Love's Comedy (1862) is of especial interest 
to the student of the prose plays. In it are float- 
ing, amorphous perhaps, the motives we know 
so well of the later Ibsen. The comedy is 
accessible to English readers, for it has been 
translated by C. H. Herford, with an introduc- 
tion and notes. Falk and Svanhild part because 
they fear themselves, — she to marry a rich mer- 
chant, he to go his poetic path and attempt to fly 
against the wind. The cruel satire of the lines 
stirred all Norway. The paradox of two young 
folk abandoning each other just because they 
fear their love will end the way of most married 
love, is at least a rare one. As much as we 
admire Svanhild's resolution to remember her 
love as a beautiful ideal, unshattered by material 
realization, we cannot help suspecting that sensi- 
ble old Gulstad's money bags have a charm for 
her practical bourgeois nature. It is Ibsen and 
his problem that is more interesting ; we see the 
parent idea of a long line of children, that idea 
which may be embodied in one phrase, — never 
surrender your personality. " Nothing abides 
but the lost" might be a motto for the piece, 
as Dr. Herford says. Brandes and Wicksteed 
argue most interestingly from the theme. The 
young Ibsen had recognized the essential mock- 
ery of so-called romantic love, with its silly 
idealizations, its perplexed awakenings, its future 
filled with desperate unhappiness. He had the 
courage to say these things by way of a satirical 
parable, and there arose upon the air a burden 
33 



HENRIK IBSEN 

of disgust and hatred : cynic, atheist, brutal, and 
shocking. Ibsen bore it as he bore his life long 
the attacks of press and public — in silence. He 
could wait, and wait he did. 

When Lugne-Poe produced The Comedy of 
Love at his Theatre de l'CEuvre, the translation 
by Mile. Colleville and F. de Zepelin, Catulle 
Mendes, who had been quarrelling with M. 
Poe to the extent of a duel, wrote the following 
criticism of Ibsen's early work. It illustrates 
the real Gallic point of view in the Ibsen 
controversy : — 

It seems that sensitive admirers of Henrik Ibsen 
do not class The Comedy of Love among the master- 
pieces of the great Norwegian. I am glad of it for 
the sake of those masterpieces. The thing which is 
displeasing above everything in this piece, where 
Ibsen's genius once more halts, is that one is unable 
to get at the initial intention of the author. What 
does he pretend to teach by making to evolute and 
chatter in the garden of a country house — what 
house I do not know, but for certain it is a matri- 
monial one — a number of engaged couples, married 
folks and parsons who are the fathers of a dozen 
children each ? Those who used to love love no 
more ; those who were romantic have become bour- 
geois ; those who are still romantic will become bour- 
geois. Then there is a poet, whose lyrics we should 
classify in France — but we are in Lugne-Poe's 
house ! — as provincial, who treats like a Philistine 
all these poor engaged persons, these engaged lovers, 
of our everyday life. As for him, being a poet 
(Heavens I how mediocre his verses must be 1 ) — • 
20 



ICONOCLASTS 

he pursues the vague, the immaterial, the sublime. 
He would like very well to carry with him in this 
pursuit a young person, once upon a time "poetical," 
but all the same strongly "practical," who, after in- 
clining for an instant toward a life of devotion and 
devouement with the poet, does not hesitate to espouse 
a very rich merchant, who evidently has read Emile 
Augier, badly translated. 

It is with difficulty I discover the object of Henrik 
Ibsen. This puzzle is, however, very excusable in 
a French critic, since it is shared by critics of the 
North. Madame Ahlberg (read Ernest Tissot's 
book) thinks that Ibsen desires to show the con- 
trast between love and the caricature of it which 
we see in marriage. Georg Brandes, the celebrated 
Danish critic, in The Comedy of Love esteems it 
impossible to know where he would carry the poet, 
and says, " the only certain thing is his pessimistic 
conception of love and marriage." 

But Henry Jaeger, Norwegian critic, is not even 
sure of this, and to his mind this piece indicates that 
there are " sentiments of love, like those of religion ; 
that is to say, which lose in sincerity the moment 
they are expressed." On which side should a 
Frenchman have an opinion on points which so 
divide much nearer judges ? At the bottom I am 
not far from believing that Ibsen premeditated mak- 
ing it understood that even in love all is vanity upon 
this earth. Ecclesiastes was of this advice, and 
banality, that gray sun, shines on all the world. 
Is this to say that The Comedy of Love is a medio- 
cre work? Not at all. Denuded of all dramatic 
interest, puerile because of its romantic philosophy, 
and often tedious to the point of inspiring us with 

30 



HENRIK IBSEN 

the fear of a never ending yawn, this piece, all the 
same a dream of youth already virile, agitates in its 
incoherence, ideas, forces, revolts, ironies, and hopes, 
which a little later in more sure works, obscure but 
sure, will be the sad challenges of human personality. 
And moreover, in the lyrical language of personages 
too emphatically lyrical, which proceeds from that 
Suabianism which Heine vanquished, among all 
the little birds, all the little flowers, all the starlit 
nights, and other sillinesses of German romance, 
towers, flashes, and radiates resplendent the ardent 
soul of the true poet. 



Ill 

THE VIKINGS AT HELGELAND 

(1858) 

With Dr. P. H. Wicksteed's affirmation, 
" Ibsen is a poet," humming in my ears, I went 
to the most beautiful theatre in London, the 
Imperial, to hear, to see, above all to see, the 
Norwegian dramatist's Vikings, a few days 
before it was withdrawn, in May, 1903. For 
one thing the production was doomed at the 
start : it was wofully miscast. The most daring 
imagination cannot picture Ellen Terry as the 
fierce warrior wife of Gunnar Headman. Once 
a creature capriciously sweet, tender, arch, and 
delightfully arrogant, Miss Terry is now long 
past her prime. To play Hjordis was murdering 
Ibsen outright. 

31 



ICONOCLASTS 

But the play had its compensations. Miss 
Terry's son, Edward Gordon Craig, exercised 
full sway with the stage, lighting, costumes. 
He is a young man with considerable imagina- 
tion and a taste for the poetic picturesque. He 
has endeavoured to escape the deadly monotony 
of London stage lighting, and, unaided, has 
worked out several interesting problems. Abol- 
ishing foot and border lights, sending shafts of 
luminosity from above, Mr. Craig secures unex- 
pected and bizarre effects. It need be hardly 
added that these same effects are suitable only 
for plays into which the element of romance 
and of the fantastic largely enter. We see no 
" flies," no shaky unconvincing side scenes, no 
foolish flocculent borders, no staring back-cloths. 
The impression created is one of a real un- 
reality. For example, when the curtains are 
parted, a rocky slope, Nordish, rugged, for- 
bidding, is viewed, the sea, an inky pool, mist- 
hemmed, washing at its base. From above 
falls a curious, sinister light which gives pur- 
plish tones to the stony surfaces and masks 
the faces of the players with mysterious shad- 
ows. The entire atmosphere is one of awe, of 
dread. 

With his second tableau Mr. Craig is even 
more successful. It is the feast room in Gun- 
nar's house. It is a boxed-in set, though it gives 
one the feeling of a spaciousness that on the 
very limited stage of the Imperial is surprising. 
A circular platform with a high seat at the back, 
32 



HENRIK IBSEN 

and a long table with rough benches, railed in, 
make up an interior far from promising. A fire 
burns in a peculiar hearth in the centre, and 
there are raised places for the women. Outside 
it is dark. The stage manager contrived to get 
an extraordinary atmosphere of gloomy radiance 
in this barbaric apartment. He sent his light 
shivering from on high, and Miss Terry's Valkyr 
dress was a gorgeous blue when she stood in the 
hub of the room. All the light was tempered 
by a painter's perception of lovely hues. This 
scene has been admired very much. For many, 
however, the third act bore off the victory. A 
simple space of hall, a large casement, a dais, 
the whole flooded by daylight. Here the quality 
of light was of the purest, withal hard, as befitted 
a northern latitude. 

In the last scene of all Mr. Craig wrestled 
with the darkness and obtained several effects, 
though none startling or novel. 

The Vikings was first planned for verse — a 
Norse tragedy of fate in the Greek style. But 
the theme demanded a drastic, laconic prose, 
with nothing unessential, and, as Jaeger points 
out, without monologues, or lyric outbursts ; the 
dialogue glows with passion, but the glow never 
becomes flame or gives out sparks ; here are 
caustic wit and biting repartee, but the fighting 
is not carried on with light rapiers ; we seem to 
be watching a battle for life and death with the 
short, heavy swords which the old Vikings used 
— hatred and love, friendship and vengeance, 
33 



ICONOCLASTS 

scorn and grief — all are as intense as the sagas 
themselves. 

The dramatic poet has been reproached, as 
his biographer asserts, for " degrading the demi- 
gods " of the Vblsung Saga into mere Norwegian 
and Icelandic Vikings of the age of Erik Blodox 
— or Bloody Axe. Other critics, again, have 
commended him for making Vikings out of the 
Vblsung Saga. 

Be it as it may, the result is drama of an ex- 
cellent sort ; romantic drama if you will, yet 
informed by a certain realistic quality. Here 
again the woman is the wielder of the power, 
and not the man. Hjordis is the very incarna- 
tion of violence, of the lust of conquest, of hate, 
revenge. She would overthrow kingdoms to 
secure the man she loved, and that man is only 
a tool for her passionate ambitions. 

The Vikings at Helgeland, then, is not exactly 
a dramatic paraphrase of the Vblsung Saga. 
Ibsen absorbed the wisdom of the ancients of 
his race and made of them an organic work full 
of the old spirit, heroic, powerful, and informed 
with the harsh romance of the time. This play 
is not among his greatest, but it is none the less 
interesting as a connecting link of his youth and 
early manhood. 

Let us follow the piece scene by scene, noting 
the easy grasp of character, the pithy dialogue, 
the atmosphere of repressed passion and fero- 
cious cruelty. There are evidences of crude 
power from first to last. Upon the purple 
_ 34 



HENRIK IBSEN 

spotted rocks near the home of Gunnar Head- 
man on the island of Helgeland — in the north 
of Norway — Sigurd comes up from his two 
war-ships which lie down in the misty cove. In 
the person of Oscar Asche — familiar to New 
York theatre-goers as the appalling Hebraic 
millionnaire in Pinero's Iris — this Sigurd is a 
formidable warrior, with hair in two blond plaits, 
steel-spiked cap, and fighting harness. 

He resembled Van Dyck's Siegmund as to 
girth, and with his big bare arms, his bracelets, 
sword, and heavy stride, he gave one the im- 
pression of clanking grandeur, of implacable 
phlegm. At once a row begins, for Oernulf of 
the Fjords, an Icelandic chieftain, bars the pas- 
sage of the Viking. The pair fight. Fast from 
ship and cavern pour warriors, and Dagny, the 
wife of Sigurd. Then hostilities cease. In the 
young woman Oernulf recognizes a daughter 
wed without his consent by Sigurd ; for this 
hero, after giving up Hjordis — the foster 
daughter of Oernulf — to Gunnar, marries Oer- 
nulfs real child, Dagny. As already indicated, 
this scene was managed with remarkable deft- 
ness at the Imperial. That sterling actor, Hol- 
man Clark, no stranger in America, as Oernulf, 
carried away the major honours in this stirring 
episode. His very mannerisms lent themselves 
to an amiable complicity with the lines and 
gestures. We soon learn from his words that 
he means to extort his pound of flesh from 
Gunnar for carrying off Hjordis. Sigurd pla- 
35 



ICONOCLASTS 

cates him with presents, with assurances oi 
esteem. Dagny pleads for forgiveness, and 
wins it. 

Then enters Kara, the peasant, pursued by 
the house-carles of Hjordis, and her motive is 
sounded for the first time in this drama of 
thwarted love and hate. The wretched peas- 
ant has killed a subject of the Queen. She is 
revengeful. He pleads for his life and is prom- 
ised protection. Hjordis soon appears. She 
looks like the traditional Valkyr and is armed 
with a lance. Her nature is expressed in the 
cold way she greets her foster sister, Dagny, 
though her face brightens at the sight of Sigurd. 

Violently reproached by her foster father, 
Hjordis responds in kind. Let Gunnar be 
weak; let him renew his pact of friendship 
with Sigurd. She owes nothing to Oernulf. 
He has slain her real father in unfair fight — 
then she is called a wanton by the angry chief- 
tain and her rage flames up so that the dark 
rocks upon which they all stand seem to be 
illumined. Kara, in the interim, has gone away 
muttering his vengeance; Hjordis, dissimulat- 
ing, invites all to a great feast in Gunnar's 
house and departs. Sigurd would go. Dagny 
mistrusts. At last Sigurd tells his too-long-kept 
secret. It was he that slew the white bear and 
won the woman beloved of Gunnar. Dagny is 
amazed, and after being conjured by her hus- 
band to keep precious this story she promises. 
But she wistfully regards the ring upon her arm, 

36 



HENRIK IBSEN 

the ring of Hjordis, plucked from her wrist by 
Sigurd (the ring of the Nibelungs !). Sigurd 
bids her hide it, for if Hjordis catches a glimpse 
of it the deception will be as plain as the round 
shield of the sun blazing on high. And then — 
woe to all ! The curtains close. 

Act II is devoted to the feast and the strange 
events which happened thereat. Ibsen's magic 
now begins to work. His psychologic bent is felt 
the moment after we see Dagny and Hjordis in 
conference. The mild wife of Sigurd wonders 
audibly at the other's depression. Why should 
she bemoan her fate with such a house, a fair 
and goodly abode ? Hjordis turns fiercely upon 
her and replies, " Cage an eagle and it will bite 
at the wires, be they of iron or of gold." But 
has she not a little son, Egil ? Better no son at 
all for a mother who is a wanton, a leman ! 
She recalls with sullen wrath the words of 
Oernulf. In vain Dagny seeks to pacify her. 
The older woman is of the race of Titans. She 
tells with pride the story of the queen who took 
her son and sewed his kirtle fast to his flesh. 
So would she treat her Egil ! 

" Hjordis, Hjordis ! " cries the tender-hearted 
listener. For this she is mocked. Hjordis 
further tortures her by asking if she has accom- 
panied her husband into battle, into the halls of 
the mighty. " Didst thou not don harness and 
take up arms ? " Dagny answers in the nega- 
tive. Gunnar is extolled for his deed, a mighty 
deed as yet not excelled by Sigurd. The lis- 

37 






ICONOCLASTS 

tener seems on the point of denying this. 
Hjordis notes her agitation and presses her, 
but Dagny is faithful to her word ; she keeps 
Sigurd's secret. Then in a burst, almost lyric, 
Hjordis confesses her love for combat to the 
sisters of Hilda, the terrible Valkyrs who fly in 
the sky, carrying dead warriors to Valhall. She 
loves, too, witchcraft, and would be a witch-wife 
astride of a whale and skim the storm waves. 
"Thou speakest shameful things," says the 
frightened Dagny, and is scoffed at for her 
timidity. 

Gradually the feast begins. The warriors 
assemble. I cannot say that I admired their 
costumes, reminding me, as they did, of crazy- 
quilts. Sigurd and Gunnar enter arm in arm. 
Egil, the hope of Gunnar's house, has been sent 
away ; his father feared the descent of Oernulf 
and his men. He now regrets the absence of 
his boy. Oernulf is not present, but is repre- 
sented by his youngest son, Thorolf. After the 
drinking has begun the trouble-breeding Hjordis 
weaves her spell of disaster. She sets boasting 
the warriors, forces the hapless Gunnar to de- 
scribe how he slew the great white bear, and 
openly proclaims him a better man than Sigurd. 
Even this breach of hospitality does not embitter 
the friends. Thorolf, however, is hot, imprudent, 
and at a chance word from Hjordis is set on 
fire. Miss Terry, it must be confessed, played 
this entire scene with great dexterity. Her 
broken phrases, — for she has not a prolonged 

38 



HENRIK IBSEN 

note in her compass, — her scornful mien, hei 
raucous voice, and shrewish gestures were admi- 
rable agents for the expression of ill-stifled hate. 
Taunted beyond his self-control, Thorolf tells 
the woman that Egil has been kidnapped by 
Oernulf and his other sons. Instantly she 
screams that Egil has been slain. Thorolf 
leaves, swearing that he will be avenged ; that, 
" Ere eventide shall Gunnar and his wife be 
childless." 

At this juncture Gunnar, who has hitherto 
seemed a lymphatic sort of person, seizes his 
battle-axe, and, despite Sigurd's word of warn- 
ing, follows Thorolf and kills him. A moment 
later enter Oernulf, bearing in his arms the 
child Egil, happy and unharmed. It is a strik- 
ing climax. To the father, already bereaved of 
his other sons, lost in the fight with the treach- 
erous peasant, Kara, for the possession of the 
child, must be told the terrible news. Thorolf 
is the apple of his eye, the last of his race. 
Broken-hearted Gunnar explains. Outraged at 
the deed caused by Hjordis, the timid Dagny 
gives her the lie when Gunnar's feat is again 
nauseatingly dwelt upon. "It is Sigurd who 
won the woman ; look at the ring on my arm ! " 
Amazed, infuriated, Hjordis turns upon her hus- 
band. Is it true? Gunnar confesses without 
shame. Sigurd presses his hand and proclaims 
him a brave man, though he did not slay the 
bear. The hall empties and after Dagny — 
woman-like — triumphantly exults and cries, 
39 



ICONOCLASTS 

" Who is now the mightiest man at the board 
— my husband or thine?" Hjordis is left to 
her miserable thoughts. She soon makes up 
her mind, " Now have I but one thing left to 
do — but one deed to brood upon ; Sigurd or I 
must die." 

These words recall the fatal Siegfrieds-Tod ! 
of Gbtterdammerung. Both Wagner and Ibsen 
followed the main lines of the immortal epic. 

If in this act the student, curious of those 
correspondences which subtly knit together ages 
widely asunder, discovers a modern tone, he will 
regain the larger air of the antique North in 
Act III. It belongs essentially to Hjordis. In 
the free daylight we discover her weaving a bow- 
string. Near her, on a table, lie a bow and some 
arrows. The one soliloquy of the piece begins 
the act. It is short, pregnant — what is to fol- 
low is incorporated in its nuances. She pulls at 
the bowstring. It is tough, well weighted. " Be- 
fooled, befooled by him, by Sigurd — " But 
ere many days have passed — ! 

Gunnar enters. He has had a bad night. He 
cannot sleep because of the murdered Thorolf. 
Then for a few bars of this barbaric music Ibsen 
relapses into pure Shakespeare. We see Lady 
Macbeth and her epileptic husband merge into 
the figures of the fiercer Brynhild and the 
weaker Gunther. The man is urged on to be- 
tray, to slay his friend. 

Hjordis lies to Gunnar — as lied, when mad 
with jealousy, Brynhild to Gunther and Hagen; 
40 



HENRIK IBSEN 

but this same Hjordis has hardly the excuse of 
her bigger-souled sister. 

Gunnar weakens. He describes a dream that 
he has had of late. " Methought I had done 
the deed thou cravest ; Sigurd lay slain on the 
earth ; thou didst stand beside him and thy face 
was wondrous pale. Then said I, ' Art thou 
glad, now that I have done thy will?' But 
thou didst laugh and answer, ' Blither were I 
didst thou, Gunnar, lie there in Sigurd's stead.' " 
111 at ease, Hjordis flouts this dream and pushes 
her cause to an issue. Sigurd must die. How ? 
11 Do the deed, Gunnar — and the heavy days 
will be past." She promises cheap joys — love. 
He leaves her clutched to the very heart by 
her baleful words. The next interview is with 
Dagny. No trouble now in winging this emo- 
tional bird. Already she repents of her cruelty 
the previous night and would make amends. 
Hjordis recognizes the malleability of the woman 
and pierces her armour by proving to her her own 
unfitness for the high position as wife of Sigurd 
— now the sole hero. She plays all the music 
there is hidden within this string, and it sounds 
its feeble, little, discouraged tune without further 
ado. Dagny feels her worthlessness, has always 
felt it ; better let Sigurd go unattended, unham- 
pered, and quite alone upon that shining path 
of glory which surely awaits him. She leaves, 
Treading upon her heels almost comes the re- 
doubtable Sigurd to this exposed cavern of the 
wicked. Too soon he falls into the toils, not 
41 



ICONOCLASTS 

because, like Hercules with Omphale, he is 
merely a sensuous weakling, but because he has 
loved Hjordis from the first. The plot curdles. 
Explanations fall like leaves in the thick of 
autumn. If Sigurd has loved, Hjordis has an- 
ticipated him. This eagle bends curved beak 
and is of the lowly for the moment. She proves 
to Sigurd that the one unpardonable sin is the 
repudiation of love. 

For another and a nobler motive Sigurd gives 
place to his beloved friend Gunnar, yet none the 
less is his a crime. It must be expiated, as was 
John Gabriel Borkman's. Curious it is to note 
the persistency through a half century of an 
idea. Like Flaubert, Ibsen did not really add 
to his early acquired stock of images and ideas. 

Tempted almost beyond his powers, Sigurd 
manages to save his self-respect and remain 
faithful to his wife. He recognizes his mistake ; 
he has always loved the other woman, though 
he never knew before that this affection was 
returned. Hjordis bids him renounce all for her ; 
together they will win the throne of Harfager — 
the ultimate dream of Sigurd. Sadly he bends 
his back to her gibes, to her devilish suggestions. 
One way is open to him. He can fight Gunnar 
in behalf of Oernulf and thus avenge the death 
of Thorolf and put an end to an existence be- 
come insupportable. Hjordis has other plans. 

Act IV is short. We see the unhappy Oer- 
nulf lamenting his murdered son before a black 
grave mound. He sings his Drapa over the 
42 



HENRIK IBSEN 

dead body. A storm arises. It is a night of 
terrors. Kara, the peasant, still unappeased, 
burns the home of Gunnar. Hjordis meets 
Sigurd and, after entreating vainly, shoots him 
with the bow and arrow she has made expressly 
for the purpose. A strand of her hair is en- 
twisted in the bowstring. Sigurd, dying, tells 
her to her horror that he is not a pagan, that 
even in death he will not meet her "over there," 
for he is a Christian man ; the white God is his ; 
King iEthelstan of England taught him to know 
the new religion. (The epoch of the play is a.d. 
933.) Despairingly, the strong-souled woman 
casts herself into a chasm and is translated into 
Valhall by her immortal sisters, the Valkyrs. 
This last scene is hopelessly undramatic and, 
as given at the Imperial, quite meaningless. 
After Hjordis commits suicide the curtains shut 
out the scene. 

In the play, however, Oernulf, Dagny, Gun- 
nar, and Egil are discovered watching the storm. 
Gunnar claims the protection of the man whose 
son he has slain. The body of Sigurd is found, 
and the arrow of Hjordis. " So bitterly did she 
hate him," whispers Dagny to herself with true 
Ibsenesque irony. Gunnar says aside, "She 
has slain him — the night before the combat; 
then she loved me after all." These sly, pitiless 
strokes would have proved too much to a Brit- 
ish audience, sufficiently outraged by several of 
Hjordis's very plain speeches. The little Egil 
sees his mother on a black horse " home-faring " 
43 



ICONOCLASTS 

with the Valkyrs. The storm passes ; peacefully 
the moon casts its mild radiance upon this field 
of strange conflict. 



IV 

THE THREE EPICS 

Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867), Emperor and 
Galilean (1873) 

In his three epical works, — for epics they 
are, — Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and 
Galilean, Ibsen reached poetic heights that he 
has never since revisited. The spiritual fer- 
mentation attendant upon his first visit to Italy 
in May, 1864, gave Norway, indeed all Scan- 
dinavia, its first modern epic. And it is not 
strange that this Italian journey should produce 
such monumental results. Goethe was at heart 
never so German as in Italy ; and Ibsen, one of 
the few nam6s that will be coupled with the 
poet of Faust when the intellectual history of 
the past century is written, was never such a 
Northman as in Rome, though he had left his 
native land full of bitterness, a self-imposed 
exile, doomed to exist on the absurd stipend 
doled out to him with niggardly hands by the 
Norwegian government. Yet, instead of turn- 
ing to antiquity, he penned Brand, one of 
the few great epics since Milton and Goethe, 
and then as a satiric pendant let loose the de 
44 



HENRIK IBSEN 

moniac powers of his ironic fantasy in Peer 
Gynt. In this vast symphony, Brand is the 
first sombre movement, Peer Gynt a brilliant 
Mephistophelian scherzo, while Emperor and 
Galilean is the solemn and mystic last move- 
ment. 

Brand places Ibsen among the great mystics 
beginning with Dante and including the names 
of Da Vinci, Swedenborg, mad naked Blake, 
and Goethe. Unlike the poet of the Divine 
Comedy he set his hell on the heights, for the 
hell of the defeated is the story of that stern 
Brand who left his church in the valley, sum- 
moned his flock to follow him and found an 
Ice Church on the high hills. Only Hamlet 
and Faust are recalled to the reader as they see 
this soul warped by its ideal of " All or Noth- 
ing," and in the spiritual throes of doubt, even 
despair. His God is the merciless Jahveh 
of the later Hebraic dispensation, not the 
Eloihim of the earlier. Weakness of will is 
the one unpardonable sin. Heroic as a Viking, 
he stands for all the Norwegian race was not 
when Ibsen wrote his poem. Life broken into 
tiny fragments, waverers and compromisers, he 
lashes his countrymen so that across these 
pages you seem to hear the whistle of the 
knotted thongs. Conventional religion comes 
in for its share of abuse from the tongue of this 
new Elijah. The wife Agnes, one of the poet's 
most charming creations, is at first attracted 
by the shallow, artistic Einar. When she meets 
45 



ICONOCLASTS 

Brand her soul goes out to him. " Did you see 
him tower as he talked ? " she asks her com- 
panion. Bdt as he sacrificed his mother to his 
ideal, so he sacrifices his wife. Their child 
does not thrive in the gloomy valley where this 
cure of souls abides. No matter. He remains. 
God's will be done. The child dies. His 
clothes are sold to a gypsy because Agnes has 
shed tears over them — a human weakness. 
She opens her window in the evenings so that 
the lamplight will fall across the grave of her 
child. That consolation, too, is denied her. 
Be hard ! might be the Nietzschean motto of 
her husband. And so she dies. His mother 
died saying, " God is not so hard as my son," 
because he refused her the sacraments. She 
had ill-gotten wealth. To make restitution was 
his demand — All or Nothing. He would not 
make bargains, be a paltry go-between for God 
and man. His nobility of character repels. 
People feel his power but find him unapproach- 
able. The laissez-faire policy, the easy-going 
philosophy of the official servants of God, raises 
wrath in his bosom. He would drive these 
blasphemers from the sacred precincts of the 
temple. It is his realization of the hopelessness 
of reforming men by the old means that sends 
him to the mountains. He has built a church, 
'or the old church is too small. But the new, 
a symbol of the soaring soul, is misunderstood. 
It is a gift from Brand to his people, and so 
horrified is he with his failure to stir these petty 

4 6 



HENRIK IBSEN 

souls that he throws the church key in the 
river and summons the multitude to follow him 
upward, up there in the clouds, where the true 
God abides away from the vileness of mart and 
palace. Some follow, many mock, and he is 
finally stoned and deserted. A crazy creature, 
Gerd, who symbolizes wildness, an egotist who 
scorns human ties; she it is who is appointed 
by the poet to open Brand's eyes. His spiritual 
pride has been his downfall, for while thinking 
of others he has not "found salvation for his 
own soul." The avalanche which she starts 
overwhelms them both, but not before he hears 
a voice answer his prayer — does mankind's will, 
then, count for nothing. "He is the God of 
Love," is the reply. 

Havelock Ellis thinks that " we have to look 
back to the scene in the death of Lear " to 
attain a like imaginative height in literature. 
Ibsen has set his character in a most life-like 
milieu. His people are painted with a broad, 
firm hand. The mayor, the schoolmaster, the 
doctor, the sexton, are living men, and their 
worldly natures are clearly indicated. Prophet 
Brand is, though Ibsen told Georg Brandes 
that he could have made him sculptor or poli- 
tician, as well as priest Soren Kierkegaard 
and his revolt from orthodoxy may have sup- 
plied the poet for his portrait. He, however, 
more than half hints that it was Gustav 
Lammers who was the original of Brand, 
a fiery nonconformist man who built his own 
47 



ICONOCLASTS 

church and seceded from the current evangeli 
cism. 

But, after all, Brand is Ibsen's own portrait, 
is a mask for Ibsen himself. The beauty, grim 
as it is, and the picturesque variety of this great 
poem almost match its ethical grandeur. 

The Ice Church is too cold for humanity, 
Brand's ideal too inhuman. Yet he has willed, 
he has not wholly failed. His error was in its 
application — in not willing enough for himself. 
" Be what you are," he exhorts the weak Einar, 
"whatever it is, but be it out and out." No 
compromise with the powers of evil — yet 
Brand's doctrine led to his destruction. Not 
to will is a crime, to will too much leads to 
madness. What is the answer to this per- 
plexing problem ? Ibsen does not give it. In 
his phraseology "to be oneself is to lose 
oneself." And Brand, who was for "All or 
Nothing," severed his dearest ties and finally 
was destroyed himself. 

The complexity must not repel the student. 
Mr. C. H. Herford's translation with the illu- 
minating introduction is well worth the read- 
ing. He thinks that the " Norwegian priest 
is tortured ... as was Hamlet; Hamlet's 
power of resolve is depleted by the restless 
discursiveness of his intellect; Brand's failure 
in sympathetic insight hangs together with his 
peremptory self-assertion. . . . Unless appear- 
ances wholly deceive, Shakespeare drew in 
Hamlet the triumph of impulses which agitated 

4 8 



HENRIK IBSEN 

without dominating his nature." Ibsen had 
lived Brand, he confesses it. 

But as a stage play, and it has been played, it 
is not a success. It lacks condensation. A bat- 
tle-field of two tense souls — for Agnes's almost 
matches Brand's at times — it is too long and 
too loosely constructed in its joints for effective 
dramatic representation. Dr. Wicksteed makes 
an acute point when he shows that Einar's smug 
conversion — which fills Brand with loathing — ■ 
is missed by the priest, for " only a man whose 
heart is dead can live by that destroying phrase, 
'All or Nothing.' The principle which slays 
the saintly Agnes, and drives her heroic hus- 
band mad, fits the miserable Einar like a glove ; 
he is happy and at home with it." 

Self-realization through self-surrender is the 
fundamental organ-tone of the masterly, over- 
arching epic. And note the symbolism of the 
church, the church in the valley, and Gerd's Ice 
Church ! This symbol of architecture reappears 
in The Master Builder, just as the avalanche 
motive reappears in When We Dead Awaken. 
The mountain-tops are the abodes of Ibsen's 
heroes, — who are his thoughts, — and there he 
scourges the human soul on this lofty Inferno. 

In Brand, Ibsen girded against the weak- 
lings, the men of half-hearted measures, the 
conventional cowards of civilization. In Peei 
Gynt he makes a hero of such a one, a lying, 
boastful fellow. The poem is one of the most 
49 



ICONOCLASTS 

audacious and fantastic ever written. Yet with 
all its shifting phantasmagoria, it so stands four- 
square rooted in the old, brown earth. Peer is 
a rascal, but a lovable one ; a liar from the first 
page to the last. He "is himself" without a 
deviation from the crooked paths of selfishness. 
Again Ibsen puzzles, for the very keystone of 
his ethical arch is individuality. Peer is a 
compromiser at every station of his variegated 
career. He, too, treats his mother cruelly, 
though from different motives from Brand. 
He runs off with another man's bride, because 
he has been too lazy to win her lawfully. He 
does this in the face of a woman, Solveig, for 
whom he has entertained the first unselfish 
desire of his shallow existence ; he goes to the 
trolls and lives in the swamps of sensuality — 
where Solveig follows him, but is left ; he goes 
to America after his mother's death, — a most 
affecting page, — makes a fortune by selling 
Bibles, rum, and slaves, buys a yacht, sets up 
for a cosmopolitan ; " has got his luck from 
America, his books from Germany, his waist- 
coat and manners from France, his industry 
and keen eye for the main chance from Eng- 
land, his patience from the Jews, and a touch 
of the dolce far niente from the Italians." He 
makes friends, for he is successful. They 
maroon him on a savage shore, but blow up his 
yacht. He thanks God for the swift retribu- 
tion — as- others have done in similar predica- 
ments — though he thinks the Lord is not very 
So 



HENRIK IBSEN 

economical. Many adventures ensue, from the 
episode with the dancing girl Anitra to the 
crowning in a madhouse of Peer as Emperor 
of Himself. 

At last, old, ruined, he returns to Norway. 
In the mountains, in the identical hut, he finds 
the patient Solveig, who has always loved him. 
He has met the Button-moulder, Death, who tells 
him that he is doomed to the melting-pot, there 
to be re-minted. He has never been himself, 
he the thrice-selfish Peer Gynt. His old thoughts 
come back to him materialized as balls of wool. 
"We are thoughts," they cry, "thou shouldst 
have thought us ; hands and feet thou shouldst 
have lent us." So this scamp, who " lived his 
life " seemingly to the utmost, never lived it at 
all, blenches before the Boyg, the great, amor- 
phous mass that blocks his path, and listened 
to its whispered " Go round." He always skirted 
difficulties, never faced them, a moral coward, a 
time-server. Yet he may escape the Button- 
moulder, for Solveig has believed in him. 
" Where have I been with God's stamp on my 
brow?" he asks her, bewildered before the dawn- 
ing perception of his worthlessness. 

"In my faith, in my hope, in my love," she 
smilingly answers. The Button-moulder calls 
without the house ; " we meet at the last cross- 
way, Peer, and then we shall see — I say no 
more." But Solveig guards him as he sleeps. 

The curse of Peer Gynt is his overmastering 
imagination coupled with a weak will. It proves 
5i 



ICONOCLASTS 

his downfall. "To be oneself, is to slay one- 
self," says the Button-moulder. The lesson is 
the same as in Brand, — self-realization through 
self-surrender. This parody of Don Quixote 
and Faust was never the real Peer Gynt until 
the end. 

The musical setting of Peer Gynt by Eduard 
Grieg gives no adequate idea of the poem's daz- 
zling humour, versatility, poetic power, malice, 
swing, speed, and tenderness. Grieg, with the 
possible exception of the episode of Peer's 
mother's death, has written in a sheer melodra- 
matic vein. Brand and Peer Gynt brought to 
Ibsen the fame he deserved, though it was thus 
far confined to Norway. 

The huge double drama, Emperor and Gali- 
lean, with the sub-title, a World Historic Drama, 
is in a theatrical sense one of Ibsen's few fail- 
ures, though epical literature would sadly miss 
this vast and hazardous undertaking devoted to 
Caesar's apostasy and the Emperor Julian, all 
in its ten acts. Naturally enough, even Ibsen's 
admirers admit that the work lacks dramatic 
unity and that it is without culminating interest. 
Yet dramatic it is, this narrative of Julian, the 
so-called Apostate, who conceived the crazy 
notion of dragging from its grave the forms 
of a dead and dusty paganism. He hates the 
Galilean and finally becomes mad enough to 
crown himself a god. The vivid pictures testify 
to Ibsen's powers of evocation, for it is said that 
52 



HENRIK IBSEN 

he was not deeply read in the classics. Dr. 
Emil Reich finds in Julian something decadent, 
a prevision of the familiar Parisian type noted by 
Huysmans. Rather have Huysmans and Ibsen 
gone to ancient Rome for their figures — Julian 
has a touch of the Neronic cruelty and lust, 
just as he has that monstrous artist's Caesarian 
madness of dominion. 

It is the scholar Julian listening to the teach- 
ings of the seer Maximus who most attracts. 
Maximus predicts the advent of the Third King- 
dom, the kingdom which is neither that of the 
Galilean nor of the Emperor. It is an empire 
that will harmonize both the empire of pagan 
sensuality and the empire of the spirit and 
bring forth the empire of man. That will 
be the Third Kingdom; "he is self -begotten 
the man who wills. . . . Emperor God — God 
Emperor. Emperor in the kingdom of the 
spirit, — and God in that of the flesh." This 
mystic thought recalls that Joachim of Flora, 
whose prophecies of the approaching Third 
Kingdom were approved by the Franciscans, by 
that section which was called the Spirituals. 

There are some superb " purple patches " in 
Emperor and Galilean, particularly in the second 
drama. Jealous of the Redeemer, for he would 
be a world builder, he asks Maximus : — 

" Where is he now ? What if that at Golgo- 

tha, near Jerusalem, was but a wayside matter, a 

thing done, so to speak, in passing, in a leisure 

hour ? What if he goes on and on, and suffers, 

53 



ICONOCLASTS 

and dies, and conquers, again and again, from 
world to world ? O that I could lay waste the 
world ! Maximus — is there no poison in con- 
suming fire, that could lay creation desolate, as 
it was on that day when the spirit moved alone 
on the waters?" A second Alexander this, 
not groaning for more worlds to conquer, but 
eager to slay the Son of Man. 

Maximus has told him that, " You have tried 
to make the youth a child again. The empire 
of the flesh is swallowed up in the empire of 
the spirit. But the empire of the spirit is not 
final, any more than the youth is. 

" You have tried to hinder the growth of the 
youth — to hinder him from becoming a man. 
O fool, who have drawn your sword against 
that which is to be — against the third empire 
in which the twin-natured shall reign." 

After bewailing that the Galilean will live 
in succeeding centuries to tell the tale of 
the Emperor's defeat, Julian sees blood-red 
visions, the hosts of the Galilean, the crimson 
garments of the martyrs, the singing women, 
and all the multitudinous sent to overthrow him. 
In the ensuing battle he dies with the historic 
exclamation upon his lips, — "Thou hast con- 
quered, O Galilean ! " 

Wicksteed points out that Julian is a pedant, 
not a prophet. Again we may see operating in 
another environment a Peer Gynt on the throne, 
a Skule of the Pretenders. Julian doubted 
as did Skule his divine call; he did not really 
54 



HENRIK IBSEN 

believe in himself, and under he went on his 
way to the Button-moulder. Emperor and Gali- 
lean has all the largeness of an epic and much 
of that inner play of spiritual functions which 
may be seen amplified in its two predecessors. 

The double drama was performed for the first 
time in its original language at the National 
Theatre, Christiania, March 20, 1903. It was 
played in German in connection with the cele- 
bration of Ibsen's seventieth birthday in Berlin 
in 1898, and earlier in 1896 at Leipsic. 



V 

THE YOUNG MEN'S LEAGUE 
(1869) 

The Young Men's League is actually the first 
of the prose social dramas, though in Love's 
Comedy, published seven years earlier, we find 
the poet preoccupied with love and marriage. 
Politics and politicians fill the picture, an ex- 
ceedingly animated one of the new play. Some 
critics pretend to see in the figure of Steens- 
gaard a burlesque of Bjornson, with whom 
about this time Ibsen had a quarrel. But this 
has been denied. Steensgaard is the ideal 
politician, — that is, the politician without ideals. 
He is carried away by the sound of his own 
sonorous voice, by the rumbling of his own 
empty rhetoric. Brought up in low environ- 
55 



ICONOCLASTS 

ment, he snobbishly worships all this as base and 
vulgar. So we find him capitulating to the 
enemy at the first attack, a little flattery, a 
pleasant visit to an aristocratic house, a peep 
at the daughter, and Steensgaard has changed 
his political skin. He has so long misled him- 
self that he misleads others. He is a phrase- 
monger, a parvenu, a turn-coat. He is, in a 
word, a politician all the world over. Thack- 
eray would have delighted in the portrait of this 
blathering, self-confident, self-deceived — a Peer 
Gynt in politics, but without Peer's brilliant 
imagination. The characters grouped about 
him are very vital, — the pompous aristocrat, 
Chamberlain Bratsberg ; the impressionable 
Selma ; Monsen the swindler, Bastian and 
Ragna his children ; the shrewd Dr. Fjeldbo ; 
Daniel Heire and Madame Rundholmen — the 
latter one of those incomparably observed 
women of the lower middle classes so grateful 
to Ibsen's powers of depiction. 

When the comedy was produced, a scandal 
ensued. The dramatist had spared neither high 
nor low. The piece was hissed and applauded 
until the authorities interfered. It is more local 
than any of the plays, though some of the 
characters are sufficiently universal to be appre- 
ciated on any stage, Steensgaard the lying law< 
yer-politician in particular. 



56 



HENRIK IBSEN 

VI 

PILLARS OF SOCIETY 

(1877) 

Pillars of Society is the fifteenth play of Hen- 
rik Ibsen, several of which, among them Norma 
and The Warriors' Tomb, have not yet been 
published. Written in Munich, it appeared in 
the summer of 1877. The ensuing autumn saw 
the play on the boards of nearly all the Scandi- 
navian theatres ; Germany followed suit early 
the next year, and the success of this satiric so- 
cial comedy ran like wildfire throughout the 
continent. It was not until December 15, at 
the Gaiety Theatre, London, that it had an 
English hearing. 

There is something of Swift in its bitter strokes 
of sarcasm at the expense of the ruling commercial 
classes. The Northern Aristophanes, who never 
smiles as he lays on the lash, exposes in Pillars of 
Society a varied row of whited sepulchres. His 
attitude is never that of Thackeray : he never 
seems to sympathize with his snobs and hypocrites 
as does the kindly English writer. There is no 
mercy in Ibsen, and his breast has never har- 
boured the milk of human kindness. This re- 
mote, objective art does not throw out tentacles 
of sympathy. It is too disdainful to make the 
slightest concession, hence the difficulty in con- 
vincing an audience that the poet is genuinely 
human. We are all of us so accustomed to the 
57 



ICONOCLASTS 

little encouraging pat on our moral hump that 
in the presence of such a ruthless unmasking 
of our weaknesses we are apt to cry aloud, — 
" Ibsen, himself, is an enemy of the people ! " 

It is an ugly, naked art, an art unadorned by 
poetic halos, lyric interludes, comic reliefs, or 
the occasional relaxation by wit of the dramatic 
tension. Love me, love my truth, the play- 
wright says in effect; and we are forced to 
make a wry face as we swallow the nauseous and 
unsugared pill he forces down our sentimental 
gullets. His sinews still taut from the extraor- 
dinary labours of Emperor and Galilean, that 
colossal epic-drama of Julian the Apostate, the 
Scandinavian poet felt the need of unbending, 
so he wrote Pillars of Society. It is the second 
of that group of three dramas dealing with 
social and political themes in the large, external 
style of which he is the unrivalled possessor. 
Ibsen smelt corruption in all governments of 
the people by the people and against the people. 
He foresaw that King Log was more dangerous 
than King Stork. For him Demos has ever 
been the most exacting of tyrants, the true foe 
to individuality. 

The student of social pathology will find 
much that is amusing in a grim sort of a way 
scattered throughout the scenes of Pillars of 
Society. There is much action, much swift 
dialogue, much slashing wit, and the general 
atmosphere is of a more breezy character than 
in the plays which follow this one. Cheerful 

58 



HENRIK IBSEN 

it is not. Surgery, whether of the body or the 
soul, is not exactly pleasure-breeding. The 
story is not an involved one, though Ibsen has 
woven a sufficiently complex pattern to afford 
aesthetic interest in its disentanglement. If Con- 
sul Bernick had not been in need of money, he 
would not have married his meek wife, Betty, to 
whose elder half-sister he had previously pledged 
his faith. As a pillar of society in a thriving 
community, as the pillar of its church and com- 
merce, Bernick could never afford to be caught 
napping. Once it had nearly happened. He 
had carried on an illicit love affair with a French 
actress. Her husband surprised the pair. Ber- 
nick contrived an escape. So his brother-in- 
law, who had slipped away to America, was 
blamed for the scandal, and you may easily 
imagine the tongue-wagging and head-nodding 
in this philistine town. 

It seems that Ibsen levelled his shafts at a 
species of social hypocrisy peculiar to his native 
land. Here in America, where all is fair and 
naught is foul, his satire falls short of its mark, 
for our target is clean, and our sepulchres are 
unwhited ! Probably this optimistic sense of 
being different — and better than our neigh- 
bours — fills us with satisfaction in the pres- 
ence of an Ibsen play. Strangely enough the 
people in this very drama entertain identical 
opinions on the subject of their American 
brethren ! Perhaps Pillars of Society is not so 
provincial in its character-painting as some of 
59 



ICONOCLASTS 

Ibsen s critics have imagined. Perhaps his shoe 
fits! 

The return of the supposed fugitive Johan, 
Bernick's scapegoat brother-in-law, finds the 
Consul beloved and respected by his fellow- 
citizens. He has educated in his own house- 
hold Dina Dorf, the daughter of that French 
actress with whom years before he had seen 
merry days — that is, if there is really any joy 
of life in those dull, drab Norwegian commu- 
nities. With Johan returns Lona Hessel, the 
elderly sister-in-law. The Bernick household is 
dismayed at this rude invasion of the " Ameri- 
cans," and the tragi-comedy begins in earnest. 
Bernick has not improved with the years. He 
has become more grasping for wealth and power. 
He even conceives the idea of sending to sea 
an untrustworthy ship. Its rotten hulk almost 
carries off his young son, while the father 
imagines that the unwelcome visitors, Johan 
and Lona, are on board. To complicate matters, 
Dina, sick of the false odour of sanctity in the 
home of Bernick, loves Johan, and to the infinite 
scandal of every one she speaks out her mind. 
She will go to America, where people are not so 
good — alas ! Ibsen didn't know that our na- 
tional goodness is becoming as a rank, threaten- 
ing vegetation upon the body politic. 

Furthermore Bernick, so as to make himself 

pose as a self-sacrificing, deeply injured man, 

has insinuated that Johan was an embezzler as 

well as an immoral man. About the figure 

60 



HENRIK IBSEN 

of the Consul there cluster several admirable 
hypocrites : Rector Rorlund, who keeps Ber- 
nick upon his pinnacle of self -righteousness ; 
Hilmar Tonnessen, who goes about sniffing out 
other people's soul maladies and carrying with 
peevish pride the "banner of the ideal"; and 
several merchants, who are in with the Consul 
whenever a " deal," public or private, is pos- 
sible. The minor characters, the women in 
particular, are individually outlined from the 
shipbuilder Aune, with his sturdy adherence to 
the interests of the Bernick house and his weak- 
kneed code of morals, to the veriest sketch of 
a clerk — all are human, brimming over with 
selfish humanity. 

The catastrophe is led up to with a masterly 
gradation of incident. Confronted by Lona 
when in his darkest hour of despair and need, 
Bernick has the lying garments in which he 
invests himself for his family and friends torn 
away by the fearless words of Lona. She does 
not accuse him of committing the one unfor- 
givable, biblical sin which Ella Rentheim 
throws at the desperate head of John Gabriel 
Borkman. No, Lona does not say, " You slew 
the love that was in me ; " she tears up two 
incriminating letters, she declares that with 
Johan and Dina she will return to America; 
but — but Bernick must escape from the cage 
of lies in which, like a monstrous mas'ter-spider, 
he has been spinning a network of falsehoods 
for the world. He groans out that it is too late, 
61 



ICONOCLASTS 

that he must " sink along with the whole of the 
bungled social system" — he is not the first, 
nor the last man, who has attempted to shift 
upon society his individual sins. He calls him- 
self the tool, not the pillar, of society, and you 
seem to see, as he talks, the plaster flaking off 
in great patches, and the ugly stains coming 
into view. 

A grand demonstration by the town is made : 
torchlight, music, speeches, a presentation, and 
all the rest of the cheap, vain humbug of which 
we all disapprove so heartily in America — and 
indulge in it about once every hour. Bernick 
tells the truth, confesses that he is the real 
sinner, not Johan, and shocks his world immeas- 
urably, especially the priggish Rorlund. That 
worthy rector, who would marry Dina in a 
pitying, pardoning way, is flouted by her. She 
leaves with Johan. Then, it may be confessed, 
there is a flat, conventional conclusion, " docked 
of its natural, tragic ending," as Allan Monk- 
house truthfully declares. Bernick is in reality 
re-whitewashed at the close of this powerful, 
picturesque play. 

One feels instinctively that more could be 
done with Lona and Bernick, more utilized 
from the strong scenes between Aune and Ber- 
nick. But in John Gabriel Borkman, Ibsen 
later realized the wicked grandeur inherent in 
the character of a tremendous financial scoun- 
drel ; like Balzac's Mercadet, his Borkman is a 
figure hewn from the native rock. Bernick is 
62 



HENRIK IBSEN 

a man you may meet iiu Wall Street, and cer- 
tainly on any Sunday in any given church you 
enter. He is proud, pious, fat as to paunch, 
and lean-souled; and he drives a hard bargain 
with God, man, and devil. In a word, the aver- 
age pillar of any society, one who believes in 
making religion and patriotism pay ; a good 
father, a good husband, a good fellow, is the 
inscription chiselled on his marble mortuary 
shaft — and then the worms stop to smile archly 
at their eternal banquet! Truth is always at 
the bottom of a grave. And Ibsen is a terrible 
digger of graves when he so wills it. 

As a matter of record it would not be amiss 
to state that Pillars of Society, written in 1877, \ 
was produced in America at the Irving Place 
Theatre, December 26, 1889, with Ernest Pos- 
sart as Bernick, Frau Christien as Mrs. Bernick, 
and Frl. Leithner as Lona. In English it was 
first heard at the Lyceum Theatre, March 6, 
1 89 1, with George W. Fawcett as Bernick, Alice 
Fischer as Lona, and Dina Dorf played by 
Bessie Tyree. There was a third performance 
at Hammerstein's Opera House three days 
later. Wilton Lackaye and his company re- 
vived the piece at the Lyric Theatre, New 
York, April 15, 1904. 



63 



ICONOCLASTS 

VII 
A DOLL'S HOUSE 

(i879) 

Ibsen has been persistently confounded with 
those mannish women who, averse from mar- 
riage, furiously denounce it as a tyrannical insti- 
tution. Strindberg, who was half mad at the 
time, accused the Norwegian poet of being a 
woman's rights advocate. Dr. Brandes has told 
us the contrary. Ibsen was never a woman's 
man ; he did not like women's society, prefer- 
ring men's. He did not admire John Stuart 
Mill's book on the woman question, and enter- 
tained an antipathy for those writers who de- 
clare, gallantly enough, that they owe much in 
their books to their wives. A sheer sense of 
justice impelled him to view the institution of 
matrimony as not always being made above. 
A woman is an individual. She has, there- 
fore, her rights, not alone because of her sex, but 
because she is a human being. So he wrote 
A Doll's House to show a woman's soul in trav- 
ail beset by obstacles of her own and others' 
making. 

Thoroughly he accomplished his task. Nora 
Helmer, a lark-like creature in Act I, grows be- 
fore our eyes from scene to scene until, at the 
fall of the curtain, she is another woman. In 
few dramas has there been such a continuous 

64 



HENRIK IBSEN 

growth. The play seems a trifle outmoded to- 
day, not because its main problem will ever 
grow stale, but because of the many and con- 
flicting meanings read into it by apostles of 
feminine supremacy. Ibsen declared in one of 
his few public speeches that he had no intention 
of representing the conventional, emancipated 
woman. 

It is Nora as an individual cheated of her true 
rights that the dramatist depicts, for her mar- 
riage, as she discovers in the crisis, has been 
merely material and not that spiritual tie Ibsen 
insists upon as the only happy one in this rela- 
tion. So she goes away to find herself, and her 
going was the signal for almost a social war in 
Europe. His critics forgot that Ibsen was a 
skilled deviser of theatric effects, and such an 
unconventional exit was not without its artistic 
values. This does not mean that he was insin- 
cere — Nora's departure is a logical necessity. 
Without it the play would be sheer sentimental, 
and therefore banal, nonsense. Nevertheless, 
that slammed door reverberated across the roof 
of the world, and not over the knocking at the 
gate in Macbeth was there such critical con- 
troversy. 

One finds Nora Helmer a fascinating type of 
womanhood to study. To be sure, she is not 
new — neither is Mother Eve, but can we ponder 
the apple story too often or unprofitably ? This 
Scandinavian Frou-Frou, bursting with joy of 
life, is confronted with a grave problem, and as 

65 



ICONOCLASTS 

she has been brought up perfectly irresponsible 
and a doll, she solves the problem in an irrespon- 
sible manner. She commits forgery, believing 
that the end justified the means, and you per- 
force sympathize with her as her act brought 
good, not evil — rather would not have brought 
evil if it had not been for the evil mind oi 
Krogstad. 

After the awakening Nora resolves to go 
away — away from husband, home, and children. 
That such a revulsion should occur in the nature 
of a gadabout and featherbrain like this girl, is 
not unnatural. Now Torvald is not a bad man. 
On the contrary, he is what the world calls a 
good man, and he is an insufferably selfish, 
priggish bore into the bargain. Nora knew 
that when she left him "the miracle of mira- 
cles " would never occur — that the leopard does 
not change his spots. The end of this human 
fugue, so full of passion and vitality, contains 
some of the strongest lines Ibsen penned. Nora 
is such a volatile, gay, frivolous, restless, per- 
verse, affectionate, womanly, childish, loving, 
and desperate creature, that we hardly marvel 
at both her husband and her father petting her 
like a doll. The awakening was severe, and 
Torvald suffered, and it served him quite right. 
Dr. Rank forms " a cloudy background " to the 
happiness of the Helmer household. He is 
very interesting, with his cynicism and tragic 
resolves and passion. But he serves his pur- 
pose in indicating certain things to Nora. He 
66 



HENRIK IBSEN 

first suggests, unconsciously, to her the thought 
of suicide, for Krogstad discovers this thought 
lurking in her mind at his second visit and just 
after Dr. Rank has made his confession of love 
to her. As for Krogstad, he is only a man of 
mixed impulses. He could have been a decent 
member of society ; indeed, he tried hard to be. 
The unfortunate entrance into the Helmer 
family life of Mrs. Linden upset all of his cal- 
culations, and he became a blackmailer in con- 
sequence. 

The afternoon of February 15, 1894, Mrs. 
Fiske played Nora in A Doll's House at the 
Empire Theatre. It was a benefit performance. 
Her support was unusually strong; W. H. 
Thompson, the Krogstad, won critical admira- 
tion for the manner in which he suggested 
the shades of a character whose possibilities 
for good and evil are perplexingly interwoven. 
Mrs. Fiske was, however, the surprise of the 
day. Shedding her Frou-Frou skin, she sounded 
every note on the keyboard of Nora Helmer's 
character. She was bird-like, evasive, frankly 
selfish, boiling with material enthusiasms, a crea- 
ture of air, fire, caprice, gayety, and bitterness. 
Excepting Agnes Sorma no one has indicated 
with such finesse of modulation the awakened 
moral nature of the woman. And it is to be 
doubted if Mrs. Fiske ever bettered that first 
rapturous interpretation. 

The ending is an unresolved cadence, though 
to the ear attuned to the finer spiritual harmonies 
67 



ICONOCLASTS 

it is not difficult to discern that the wife will 
suffer and grow — and be herself. But the 
children, cries the world ! Ibsen, who has proved 
his love for the little ones, answers the question 
by another. Read Ghosts, and you will see 
what might have become of the Helmer children 
if Nora had stayed at home and continued in her 
life-lie. 

As an acting role Nora has won the suffrages 
of such artists as Betty Hennings, Agnes Sorma, 
Helene Odilon, Gabrielle Rejane, Friederike 
Gossmann, Lilly Petri, Modjeska, Mrs. Fiske, 
Irene Triesch, Hilda Borgstrom (a great Hilda 
Wangel), Stella Hohenfels, and Eleonore Duse. 

Henrik Ibsen once attended a dinner given in 
his honour by the Ladies' Club of Christiania, 
and made a speech about himself in answer to 
a toast. Miss Osina Krog, in proposing Ibsen's 
health, spoke of him as a poet who had done 
much for woman through his works. Dr. Ibsen's 
reply was this : — 

All that I have composed has not proceeded from 
a conscious tendency. I have been more the poet 
and less the social philosopher than has been be- 
lieved. I have never regarded the women's cause 
as a question in itself, but as a question of man- 
kind, not of women. It is most certainly desirable 
to solve the woman question among others, but that 
was not the whole intention. My task was the de- 
scription of man. Is it to some extent true that the 
reader weaves his own feelings and sentiments in 
with what he reads and that they are attributed to the 
68 



HENRIK IBSEN 

poet ? Not alone those who write, but also those who 
read, compose, and very often they are more full of 
poetry than the poet himself. I take the liberty to 
thank you for the toast, with a modification, for I see 
that women have a great task before them in the 
field for which this ladies' association works. I 
drink the health of the club and wish it happiness 
and success. 

I have always regarded it as my task to raise the 
country and to give the people a higher position. In 
this work two factors assert themselves. It is for 
the mothers to awake, by slow and intense work, a 
conscious feeling of culture and discipline. This 
feeling must be awakened in individuals before one 
can elevate a people. The women will solve the 
question of mankind, but they must do so as mothers. 
Herein lies the great task of women. 

And this speech quite dissipates the notion that 
Ibsen had affiliations with the Feminists. 



VIII 

GHOSTS 

(1881) 

Following the scandal created by the first per- 
formance of A Doll's House, Ghosts seemed like 
a deliberate affront to his critics, a gauntlet hurled 
into their faces by the sturdy arm of Dr. Ibsen. 
Now, he said, in effect, — though he has nevei 
condescended to pulpit polemics or cafe" aes- 
thetics, — here is a wife who resolves to endure 

69 



ICONOCLASTS 

who stays at home and bears that burden. Nora 
Helmer refused! Behold Mrs. Alving, the 
womanly woman, good housewife — malgre' die 
mime — and good mother ! 

Ghosts, like much that is great in art, is a very 
painful play. So is Macbeth, so is Lear, so is 
CEdipus Rex. There are some painful pictures 
in the small gallery of the world's greatest art, 
and in music analogous examples are not want- 
ing. Probably the most poignant emotional 
music thus far written is to be found in the last 
movement of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic Sym- 
phony. It is cosmic in its hopeless woe. Yet 
Ibsen gives the screw a tighter wrench, for he 
conceived the idea of transposing all the horror 
of the antique drama to the canvas of contem- 
porary middle-class life. 

He gives us an Orestes in a smoking jacket, 
the Furies within the walls of his crumbling 
brain. Naturally the academic critics cry aloud 
at the blasphemy. The ancients, Racine, Shake- 
speare, and the rest, softened their tragic situa- 
tions by great art. As in avast mirror the souls of 
the obsessed pass in solemn, processional atti- 
tudes ; the contours are blurred ; the legend goes 
up to the heavens in exquisite empurpled haze. 

" Very well," grumbles in answer the terrible 
old man from Norway, "I'll give you a new 
cesthetik. Art in old times is at two removes 
from life. I'll place it at one. I'll banish its 
opiates, its comic reliefs, all its conventions that 
mellow and anaestheticize." 



HENRIK IBSEN 

Then he wrote Ghosts. It is terrible. The 
Orestean Furies are localized. They are no 
longer poetic and pictorial abstractions, but a 
disease. So you can accept the thesis or leave 
it. One thing you cannot do : you cannot be 
indifferent; and therein lies one secret of Ibsen's 
power. It is his aloofness that his audiences 
resent the most of all. If, like another master 
showman, Thackeray, Ibsen would occasionally 
put his tongue in his cheek, or wink his eye in 
an aside, or whisper that the story was only 
make-believe — there, dear ones, don't run away 
■ — why, the Ibsen play might not be avoided as 
if it were the pest. But there are no concessions 
made, and the sense of reality is tremendous and 
often nerve-shocking. 

The blemishes in Ghosts are few, yet they are 
in full view. That fire is our old friend, "the 
long arm of coincidence." And what pastor of 
any congregation, anywhere, could have been 
such a doddering old imbecile as Manders with 
his hatred of insurance ? Possibly he represents 
a type of evangelical and very parochial clergy- 
man, but a type, we hope, long since obsolete. It 
is not well, either, to pry deeply into the sources 
of Oswald's insanity. Thus far it has not been 
accurately diagnosed. Let us accept it with 
other unavoidable conventions. The pity about 
Ghosts, which is in the repertory of every con- 
tinental theatre, is that the Ibsenites made of it 
a stalking horse for all kinds of vagaries, from 
free love to eating turnips raw. 

71 



ICONOCLASTS 

fbsen holds no brief for free love, or for 
diseased mental states. You may applaud Mrs. 
Alving, you may loathe her ; either way it is a 
matter of no import to this writer. To call 
Ghosts immoral is a silly and an illogical pro- 
ceeding, for it is, if it is anything at all within 
the domain of morals, a dramatic setting of the 
biblical wisdom that the sins of the fathers are 
visited upon the children. This may be pure 
pathology; in Ibsen's hands it is a drama of 
terrible intensity. 

Ghosts is a very simple but painful story. 
The dissolute Captain Alving, the father of 
Oswald, dies of his debaucheries before the play 
begins. His wife, the mother of Oswald, has 
believed it her bounden duty to hide from the 
world the cancer which is eating up her family 
life. She partially succeeds, and only when he 
brings shame to her very door does she weaken 
and fly to Pastor Manders, whom she once 
loved, and who presumably loves her. This 
worthy clergyman does only what his ideals 
have taught him. He refuses her refuge and 
sends her back to her husband, admonishing her 
that her duty is to accept the cross which God 
has imposed upon her and to reclaim her hus- 
band. Frozen up in heart and soul, Mrs. Alving 
begins a long fight with the beasts of appetite 
which rule her husband's nature. She sends 
away her son Oswald, she even adopts a bastard 
daughter of her husband's, and marries off the 
mother — a servant in her employ — to a car- 
72 



HENRIK IBSEN 

penter, Jacob Engstrand by name. The girl 
grows up to womanhood; Oswald, her son, be- 
comes a painter and lives in Paris. Captain 
Alving dies a miserable death, his vices a secret 
to all but a few, while his widow seeks a salve 
for her conscience by erecting with his money 
an orphanage. Naturally Pastor Manders takes 
much interest in this scheme, and when he meets 
Oswald fresh from Paris, he is struck by the re- 
semblance the morbid, sickly-looking youth bears 
to his dead father. 

But ajl has not been well with the young man. 
He has been told by a famous alienist in Paris 
that his days of sanity are numbered, and he is 
at a loss to conjecture why such a curse should 
be visited upon him. He always heard of his 
father's greatness and goodness. I know of few 
more touching scenes than the conversation be- 
tween mother and son, and the horrible confes- 
sion which follows. It is like a blast from a 
charnel house; but then, what power, what 
lucidity ! The poor, tortured mother unburthens 
her heart to her pastor, and of course receives 
scant consolation. How could he, according 
to his lights, treat her otherwise than he did ? 
Manders is a type, and he always faces the past ; 
Mrs. Alving looks toward the west for the glim- 
mer of the new light. Alas, it comes not ! She 
only hears her son crying aloud, " Give me wine, 
mother ! " It is the spiritual battle of the old 
and new. And the old order is changing. 

Worse follows. The boy falls in love with 
73 



ICONOCLASTS 

Regina, his half-sister, as to whose identity he is 
in absolute darkness, for she has been brought 
up as a maid in his mother's house. But with 
his mind weakening he clutches at this straw 
to help him. " Isn't she splendid, mother ? " 
he says, admiring the girl's superb animal de- 
velopment, and we can easily conjecture the 
agony of his mother. Weak she must appear in 
the pastor's eyes, for she almost hesitates about 
revealing the birth of Regina, and wavers on the 
question of Oswald marrying her. She has 
been too indulgent to the boy, and Manders 
does not scruple to tell her so. He is one 
of your iron-minded men who have a rigid 
sense of what is right and wrong, and one who 
would have no sympathy with fluttering souls 
like Amiel, Lamenais, Clough, or any of the 
spiritual band to whom dogmas are as steel 
clamps. Mr. Manders is outraged at Mrs. 
Alving, and proposes sending Regina away, 
but where ? To her father, Jacob Engstrand, 
a cunning, low, hypocritical rascal? No, he 
is not her real father. At the end of the first 
act both overhear Oswald trying to kiss Regina 
in the dining room, and another such scene, in 
which Captain Alving and Regina's mother 
were the actors, flashes before her, and she 
cries " Ghosts ! " as the curtain falls. 

Everything then goes wrong. The Alving 
orphanage burns down, and there is no in- 
surance because Pastor Mander believes that 
insuring a consecrated building against fire 
74 



HENRIK IBSEN 

would be questioning Providence. But his 
human respect plays him into the hands of 
Jacob Engstrand, whose cunning is more than 
a match for the worthy priest. The dialogue 
between these two widely varying types is a 
masterpiece. 

Mrs. Alving is at last goaded into telling Os- 
wald and Regina of their blood relationship, 
and the girl, who is a bad, selfish lot, goes 
away — deserts the family at the most critical 
period. She upbraids Mrs. Alving for not 
having told her of her true station in life, and 
turns her back on the poor mumbling wretch 
Oswald. She then walks off defiantly and to 
her putative father's home, a sailors' dance 
house. Oswald's mind is completely unhinged 
by this denouement, and he confides to his 
mother in stuttering, stammering accents — 
the sure forerunner of the crumbling brain 
within — that he has some poison to kill him- 
self with ; that he had relied on Regina to do it 
when he would be an absolute idiot; but, as 
Regina was at hand no longer, his mother must 
play the executioner. 

The end is as relentless as a Greek tragedy. 
The boy chases his mother from room to room 
imploring and screaming at her to rid him of 
his pain ; as she brought him into life without 
his consent, so should she send him forth from 
it when he bade her. It is all frightful, but 
enthralling. When Oswald cries aloud for the 
sun, the end has been reached. He is a hap- 
75 



ICONOCLASTS 

less lunatic, and his wretched, half-crazed mother, 
remembering her promise to him, searches fran- 
tically in his pocket for the morphine, and then 
a merciful curtain bars out from further view 
the finale. If Ibsen's scalpel digs down too 
deep and jars some hidden and diseased nerves, 
what shall we say ? Rather can he not turn 
upon us and cry, " I but hold the mirror up 
to nature ; behold yourselves in all your naked- 
ness, in all your corruption ! " Anatole France 
once wrote, " If the will of those who are no 
more is to be imposed on those who still are, 
it is the dead who live, and the live men who 
become the dead ones." And this idea is the 
motive of Ghosts. 

IX 

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE 

(1882) 

Ibsen was called such hard names when 
Ghosts was produced that William Archer made 
a collection of all the epithets hurled at the 
dramatist's head and published them in the Pall 
Mall Gazette with the title Ghosts and Gibber- 
ings. Of course the Norwegian was indignant 
that his play should have been so grossly mis- 
understood, and in An Enemy of the People 
he undertook to show that the reformer — the 
true pioneer — is always abused and pilloried 
as a dangerous foe to society, and that the 
76 



HENRIK IBSEN 

majority is always in the wrong. It is merely 
a case of Horace's odi profanum vulgus over 
again. But how did the playwright go about 
his task? Did he paint for us another Ajax 
defying the social lightning ? Did he give us 
a modern Coriolanus ? With his usual ideal- 
demolishing propensities this terrible old man 
makes his hero a fussy doctor — a man of the 
middle classes ; a man who forgets the names 
of the servant girls ; a man who loves to see 
his children feed on roast beef ; a man who is 
economical in little things ; a thorough profes- 
sional gentleman, who explodes, fusses, fumes, 
fidgets, goes off continually at half cock ; a 
crack-brained enthusiast, a fanatic, and a teller 
of disagreeable truths. But this doctrinaire with 
torn trousers is a mighty fellow after all, and 
by the supreme genius of his creator has quite 
as much right to live as any Homeric hero. 
Vitality is the most masterful test of a drama- 
tist's characters ; their vitality is their excuse 
for being. Every figure in An Enemy of the 
People is brimming with vitality, from the 
drunken man to Dr. Stockmann. Of course 
you can hardly be expected to take an over- 
weening interest in the condition of the water 
pipes in that little town on the south coast of 
Norway. What are water pipes to Hecuba ? 
Yet a world of principle is involved in these 
same germ-breeding conduits, and the crafty 
dramatist has, while apparently depicting local 
types, contrived to paint a large canvas* Have 
77 



ICONOCLASTS 

we not our Burgomaster Stockmanns, our Edi- 
tor Hovstads, our timid meliorists like Aslaken, 
and our fire-eating Billings ? Men, men all of 
them. 

What a daring thing it was to write a play- 
without a love scene, a play which is more like 
life than all the sensualistic caterwaulings, phi- 
landerings, and bosh and glitter of the conven- 
tional stage, which we fondly fancy holds the 
mirror up to nature ! I have before dwelt on 
the frugality of his phrases, of the delicacy and 
concise cleaving power of his dialogues. He 
has broken with the convention of monologues, 
of mechanical exits — indeed, of everything 
which savours of old-time stage artifice. His acts 
terminate naturally, yet are pregnant with pos- 
sibilities. You impatiently wait for the next 
scene, and all because a lot of nobodies in an 
out-of-the-way Norwegian health resort fight 
a man who is crazy to tell the truth — and ruin 
the place. But they are human beings even if 
they strut not in doublets and hose, and pour 
not out perfumed passion to the damosel on the 
balcony. 

One cannot sympathize much with Dr. Stock- 
mann. He, while being " the strongest man on 
earth," brought a calamity on his native place by 
his awful propensity for blabbing out the truth. 
Besides, Ibsen leaves us just a margin of doubt 
in the matter. Perhaps the worthy medical 
man was not correct in his diagnosis of the 
waters, and if this were so his conduct was inex- 

78 



HENRIK IBSEN 

disable. But he fought for that most danger 
ous of ideals, — the truth, even though he flaunts 
in the face of the mob the fact that " a normally 
constituted truth lives, let me say as a rule, 
seventeen or eighteen years: at the outside 
twenty ; seldom longer." 

One recalls Matthew Arnold's lecture on 
Numbers, in which that essayist preached the 
evils of majority. Ibsen hits at democracy when 
he can — for him the mass of the people is 
led by the few. An Enemy of the People is an 
excellent repertory piece, though one feels the 
moral stress too strongly in it. 

X 

THE WILD DUCK 

(1884) 

The Wild Duck followed An Enemy of the 
People and preceded Rosmersholm, and is 
linked by similar inner motives, so these plays 
really can be grouped as a trilogy. Stock- 
mann, the energetic denouncer of public dis- 
honesty, is now Gregers Werle, just as earnest 
and sincere in his claims for the ideal and in 
his strictures upon the erring. But from what 
a different point of view, with what different 
results ! If Stockmann is a public-spirited re- 
former, Werle is a sneak and a nuisance. Yet 
the two men's ideals coincide. Why this shift- 
ing of position on the part of Ibsen ? 
7Q 



ICONOCLASTS 

A period of depression, consequent upon his 
uninterrupted labours and their seeming futility, 
may have been one reason ; the other is prob- 
ably because Ibsen, charged with the spirit of 
bitter mockery and in a pessimistic humour, 
wished to show the obverse of his medal. From 
Brand to Stockmann his idealists had been 
heaven-stormers. Well, here is a heaven-stormer, 
an idealist, who is a dangerous man because he 
tells the truth. Is it well to blurt out the truth 
on all occasions ? The result of this thesis is 
one of the most entertaining, one of the most 
tragic, plays of the series. 

The Wild Duck has several drawbacks, the 
chief being the confusing mixture of satire and 
tragedy ; the satire almost oversteps the limita- 
tions of satire, the tragic emphasis seems to be 
placed at the wrong spot. The two qualities 
mingle indifferently. And the act ends are not 
satisfying ; they lack climax, especially after the 
catastrophe. But the dialogue as in The League 
of Youth is an admirable transcript from life. 
Each character speaks ; nothing sounds as if 
written. The glory of The Wild Duck is its 
characterization. Even the implacable Dr. Nor- 
dau praises Gina Ekdal, calling her a female 
Sancho Panza. The comparison is a happy 
one, for her husband, Hjalmar Ekdal, is a Don 
Quixote of shreds and patches, a weak, vain, 
boastful, gluttonous, shiftless fellow, and, of 
course, an idealist. He raves of the ideal, and 
he is kept to an insane pitch of cloudy self 
80 



HENRIK IBSEN 

exaltation by Gregers Werle, who, discovering 
that Gina was a former mistress of his father, 
tells Ekdal with dire results. The little Hedwig, 
the most touching in Ibsen's gallery of chil- 
dren, is also worked upon by the mischief 
maker, so that she kills herself from a spirit 
of sacrifice — more of Werle's idealism. 

Ekdal talks grandiloquently about shattered 
honour to Gina, who bids him eat bread, drink 
coffee — he has been out all night airing his 
woes to the storm. The woman's homely wit, 
solid common sense, and big heart are given 
with satisfying verisimilitude. Gregers' father, 
and his housekeeper, Mrs. Sorby ; the garret of 
the photographer Ekdal, where his disgraced, 
old drunken father has rigged up a mock forest 
in which he hunts the "wild duck" and other 
tame fowl; the character of Relling, Ibsen 
again masked, whose sardonic humour, cruel 
on the surface, is in reality prompted by a kind 
heart — he makes people believe they are grander 
than they are and therefore makes them happier ; 
all these figures in this amazing Vanity Fair are 
handled masterfully. The World-Lie is here 
in microcosmic proportions. Every one, except 
the stolid, unimaginative Gina, swaggers about 
in the sordid atmosphere of deception. Werle 
always makes matters worse, and on a painful 
note of tragedy the curtain falls. The tyranny 
of the ideal is clearly set forth. 



81 



ICONOCLASTS 

XI 

ROSMERSHOLM 

(1886) 

Rosmersholm was finished in 1886. It fol- 
lowed The Wild Duck, that ghastly mockery ot 
Ibsen's own ideals, and in its turn it was followed 
by The Lady from the Sea. The astonishingly 
fecund imagination that drew Gina Ekdal in The 
Wild Duck did not show symptoms of fatigue 
in the characterization of Rosmersholm. Its first 
representation occurred on January 17, 1887. 
Bergen, Norway, and later Berlin, heard it 
twenty-five times in one season. London had its 
taste of the strange combination of evil and good 
on February 23, 1891 ; Paris, October 4, 1893, 
with Lugne-Poe's company. All Europe wit- 
nessed with astonishment Rosmersholm, and 
New York had its first English performance 
March 28, 1904, at the Princess Theatre by 
the Century players. 

Rosmersholm is not an agreeable drama. 
Why any one who prefers amusement should 
sit it out is strange : stranger still the impulse 
to abuse it because it does not give the same 
pleasure as the circus. Like Hamlet Rosmers- 
holm has a long foreground — Emerson said 
the same of Walt Whitman. Hamlet comes 
before us after the mischief of his life has been 
worked, his father has been slain, his mother 
-.$2 



HENRIK IBSEN 

has married the slayer of her son's father, of her 
son's happiness. The first scene in Hamlet is 
illuminating ; the first two acts of Rosmersholm 
are most perplexing to an audience unprepared 
for them by study. The technical error of the 
modern play lies here : until Act III we are left 
in darkness as to Rebekka's character and her 
ruling motives. Dr. Emil Reich proposed, 
merely as a matter of experiment, a schemata 
or a new scenario, in which the first two acts 
would show Rebekka West freshly arrived at 
Rosmersholm, her conduct with Beata Rosmer, 
the slow persecution of that unfortunate lady, 
and her death by suicide at the mill-dam. This 
idea has only one drawback — Ibsen did not 
follow it when he planned his work. 

The truth is that, notwithstanding its mastery 
of character, Rosmersholm must not be viewed 
as a drama following any previous model. Emile 
Faguet declines to consider any longer the 
northern dramatist as a realist. In his early 
prose dramas, when he filled in his canvas with 
jostling throngs, Ibsen was a painter of manners; 
but as he grew, as his method became less that 
of his predecessors and more of his own, the 
action became more intense. The modern 
psychologic drama was born, the drama in which 
wills collide, but not the will for trivial things. 
It is the eternal duel of the sexes, the duel 
of the old and the new. In this sombre at- 
mosphere, subjected to many pressures by the 
black and alembicated art of the dramatic wizard, 

83 



ICONOCLASTS 

the circumstances that occur externally are ot 
little significance, the dialogue spoken not to be 
accepted unless for its "secondary intention." 
Bald on its surface, its cumulative effect dis- 
closes the souls of his people. Commonplace, 
even provincial as are their gestures, their sur- 
roundings, we presently see the envelope of hu- 
manity melt away, and soon exposed are the 
real creatures, the real men and women, exposed 
as in a dream. It is a cruel art this that un- 
wraps leaf by leaf the coverings of the human 
soul. With the average dramatist, clever though 
ne may be, his inspiration compared to Ibsen's 
is like fire in a sheaf of straw — the spark glows 
for an instant and then there is a vivid crackling 
of shallow flame. We witness the illuminated 
edge of an idea, and then it fades into the black- 
ness. Ibsen's flame is more murky than brill- 
iant ; but it makes light the swamps he traverses 
on his irresistible progress to the mountains 
beyond. 

Isolated then as is the milieu of Rosmersholm, 
its real territory is spiritual and not Rosmer's 
gloomy manor-house. The real and the ideal 
are indescribably blended. Only after much 
study does the character of Rebekka Gamvik, 
called West, yield its secrets. She was born in 
Finmark. Her mother, possibly of Lapp origin, 
had carried on an intrigue with Dr. West. 
Rebekka was its fruit. This she did not know 
until too late to avert a hideous catastrophe ; it 
was not alone her illegitimacy that so horrified 

8 4 



HENRIK IBSEN 

her when Rector Kroll informed her of it — 
there were depths which she did not care to 
explore farther, though she made the offer to 
Rosmer. Dr. West at his death bequeathed a 
small library to his adopted daughter, and this 
proved a Pandora box both to her and to Ros- 
mersholm. Books of a " liberal " character 
filled the mind of the young woman with danger- 
ous ideas ; for like the disciple in Paul Bourget's 
novel, she speedily translated these ideas into 
action. As cunning as Becky Sharp, as amo- 
rous as Emma Bovary, as ambitious as Lady 
Macbeth, Rebekka West is the most complete 
portrait of a designing woman that we know 
of; she is more trouble-breeding than Hedda 
Gabler. 

Vernon Lee speaks of "the certainty that 
something is going on, that certain people are 
contriving to live, struggle, and suffer, such as 
I am haunted with after reading Thackeray, 
Stendhal, or Tolstoy." She quotes William 
James's phrase, "the warm, familiar acquies- 
cence which belongs to the sense of reality." 
All greatly imagined characters in fiction and 
drama have this " organic, inevitable existence," 
which persists in the memory after the book is 
closed, after the curtain has fallen. Rebekka 
West is among these characters. She is more 
terrible than one of Felicien Rop's etched " Cold 
Devils." She grows in the mind like a poisonous 
vegetation in the tropics. More magnificent in 
her power to will and execute evil than Hedda 

85 



ICONOCLASTS 

Gabler, she weakens at the crucial hour; this 
same will is paralyzed by the old faiths she had 
sneered away. Edmund Gosse considers the 
failure of Rosmer as an instance of new wine 
fermenting in old bottles. Equally, in Rebekka's 
case, the old wine spoils in the new bottles. 

Taking her courage in both hands the comely 
young woman contrives to enter the household 
of Rector Kroll, whose sister Beata is married 
to Rosmer. Kroll is a sturdy schoolmaster, an 
orthodox Conservative, settled in his convic- 
tion that the world was made for good church- 
men with fat purses — by no means a ludicrous 
or a despicable character. As drawn by Ibsen, 
his is a massive personality, — sane, worldly-wise, 
a man who hates the things of the spirit just as 
he hates radicalism. But he doesn't know this. 
And it is the irony of his fate that he utters 
those smug phrases dedicated by usage to mat- 
ters spiritual, while he walks in the way of the 
flesh. A tower of strength, Kroll is more than 
the match for such a dreamer as Johannes Ros- 
mer. Brendel, besides being a fantastic adum- 
bration of Ibsen, has propulsive power. He 
changes, at each of his two appearances, the 
current of Rosmer's destiny. 

Rebekka intuitively discerns this little rift 
in the armour of Kroll, and flatters the worthy 
teacher, flatters his wife until she smuggles her- 
self beneath the Kroll roof-tree. There she en- 
counters Rosmer and his wife Beata. The latter 
is attracted by the fresh, vivacious stranger with 
86 



HENRIK IBSEN 

the free manners. Life at Rosmersholm is dull ; 
Johannes is a student of heraldry and a poor 
companion. Again Rebekka moves. She is 
soon mistress of Rosmersholm. Her quick 
brain makes her a delight to the master, her 
hypocritical sympathy an actual necessity to his 
wife. Then begins the systematic undermining 
of both. She lends Dr. West's books to the 
clergyman, and she insinuates into the feeble 
brain of Beata the deadly idea that because of 
her childlessness she is no longer worthy to 
remain Madame Rosmer. Slowly this idea 
expands, and its growth is accelerated when 
Beata sees Johannes falling away from the faith 
of his fathers. Sick in body, sick in brain, the 
deluded woman is led step by step to the fatal 
mill stream. Before the confession that Rebekka 
is disgraced and must leave Rosmersholm at 
once, Beata recoils, and quickly commits suicide. 
And now the curtain rises on Act I. 

While these facts are revealed by subtle indi- 
cations in the dialogue, a feeling of dissatisfaction 
is also aroused. Not until Act III do we learn 
of them completely, then through Rebekka's 
defiant confession. This confession is brought 
about by a simple result, the failure of Rosmer 
to reach her ambitious expectations. He is an 
idealist, a hero of dreams, one who longs to step 
into the noisy arena of life and " ennoble " men. 
Little wonder his brother-in-law Kroll mocks 
him. A Don Quixote without the Don's cour- 
age. Surely Ibsen was smiling in his sleeve at 

87 



ICONOCLASTS 

this milk-and-water Superman, this would-be 
meddling reformer to whom he adds as pendant 
the pure caricature of Ulric Brendel. Full of 
the new and heady wisdom garnered from Dr. 
West's library, Rosmer resolves to break away 
from his political party, his early beliefs, his 
very social order. The insidious teachings of 
Rebekka flush his feeble arteries. He defies 
Kroll, and the war begins. It is not very heroic, 
principally consisting in mud-throwing by rival 
newspapers. Ibsen's vindictive irony — for the 
episode was suggested by the disordered politics 
of Norway in 1885 — has ample opportunities 
for expression in the character of Mortensgaard, 
the editor of the opposition journal, a man who 
has succeeded in life because, as Brendel truth- 
fully says, he has managed to live without ideals. 
Mortensgaard is very vital. He is a scoundrel, 
but an engaging one in his outspoken cynicism. 
It is only in print that he hedges. As much 
as he desires the support of Rosmer, easily the 
most prominent man on the country-side, it is 
as Rosmer the priest and conservative and not 
Rosmer the radical. There are too many of the 
latter tribe ! 

This shifting of standards puzzles the clergy- 
man; but when he learns that the editor has 
a letter written by Beata which might incrimi- 
nate both Rebekka and himself, then he begins 
to see his false position, and also the peril of 
playing with such fire. Slowly he is undeceived 
as to Rebekka's character. He catches her 
88 



HENRIK IBSEN 

eavesdropping, and is stunned by her confession 
of treachery and murder. In the last act the 
bewildered man hears another upsetting disclos- 
ure. On the eve of her departure for the north, 
and after Rosmer has made his peace with Kroll 
and his party, she blurts forth the fatal truth. 
She has long loved Rosmer, and that love, at 
first passionate, selfish, impelled her to crime ; 
with the months came a great peace, and then, 
like a palimpsest showing through the corrupt 
training of her girlhood, her conscience asserted 
itself. Rosmersholm and the Rosmer ideals 
had begun their work of denudation and disin- 
tegration. If the Rosmer ideal ennobled, it 
also killed happiness, which really means that, 
the sting of her wickedness being extracted, 
the woman was powerless for good or for evil ; 
she no longer had the inclination to descend 
into the infernal gulf of crime, nor had she the 
will power to live the higher life. The common 
notion is that Rebekka is converted by pure 
love. It is a suspiciously sudden conversion. 
Rather let us incline to the belief that the main- 
spring of her will was broken, even before Ros- 
mer offered her marriage. Of a cerebral type, 
like the majority of Ibsen's heroines, the violence 
of her passion once cooled, she had nothing to 
make her life worth while. Her confession 
calmed her nerves ; after it, like many notorious 
criminals, she was indifferent to the outcome. 

In Rosmer the old churchly leaven began 
to work. Horrified by Rebekka's revelation, as 

89 



ICONOCLASTS 

disappointed in her as she was in him, he de- 
manded why she had confessed her love. To 
give you back your innocence, she replied. 
Does he wish for another test ? — then make 
one, she will not fear it. Straightway the stern 
priest awakens in him; he has never cast off, 
despite his blasphemies, the yoke of the Lord. 
This woman that he loves was the murderess of 
his wife Beata. An eye for an eye ! Expiation 
must be by blood sacrifice ! Does she dare go 
out on the bridge across the stream and — ? 
Rebekka, worn out, sick of the vileness of her 
soul, weary of this life which can now promise 
nothing, eagerly assents. She will go, and 
go alone. Soon the last tremor of manhood 
is felt in the superstitious brain of Rosmer. 
No, she shall not go alone. Together as man 
and wife, sealed by a kiss, they will go to 
eternity. And then the male moral coward 
and the female companion of his destiny walk 
calmly to their fate. The housekeeper watches 
them fall in the raging pool, and she is not as 
much surprised as one would imagine. 

"The dead wife has taken them," she ex- 
claims, for, like every one at Rosmersholm, she 
believes in the triumph of the dead. 

Rebekka West recalls to Georg Brandes the 
traits of a Russian woman, rather than a Scan- 
dinavian. This is true. She might have stepped 
out of a Dostoievsky novel. She is far more in- 
teresting because far more complex than Hedda 
Gabler, while not so modish or so fascinating 
90 



HENRIK IBSEN 

She is less of a moral monster than Hedda, and 
far braver. She, at least, has tested life and found 
its taste bitter in the mouth. Her eroticism we 
must take for granted ; in the play she displays 
nothing of it; all is retrospective and introspec- 
tive. The woman never contemplated suicide ; 
but that way out of the muddle is as good as 
a wretched existence in some Finnish village. 
Rosmer proposes the suicide, he dares not face 
his own wrecked ideals ; it takes a man who is 
master of himself to master his fellows. Life 
is like running water in his hands ; the woman 
he loved is a failure ; all things come too late to 
those who wait. Of Rebekka's repentance Ibsen 
leaves us in no doubt ; but that she would have 
elected self-slaughter for her end one strongly 
discredits. It is despair, not heroism, that ex- 
alts her. She committed crime for love, and 
now that crime she will expiate by self-surrender 
to her lover's wish. 

Browning would have delighted in such a 
theme as this, and might have developed it into 
a second Ring and the Book. But dramatically 
the English poet could never have beaten and 
bruised the idea into shape. Ibsen has sur- 
mounted perilous obstacles in his dramatic 
treatment of a purely psychologic subject. We 
wish to witness a conflict of wills, and not the 
hearsay of such a conflict. Thus nearly two 
acts seem wasted before the real situation occurs 
at the close of Act II, when Rosmer proposes 
marriage. But so little does the poet care for 

91 



ICONOCLASTS 

incident, for detail, that Rosmersholm might be 
played in one scene ; the main action takes place 
before the curtain goes up. The drama is a 
curious blending of several styles — there are 
two motives and two manners. Both Free Will 
and Determinism — not such Hegelian oppo- 
sites as we imagine — have each a share ; while 
a mingling of romance and realism is shown 
in the narration and in the background. The 
White Horse of Rosmersholm is a colourful bit 
of symbolism, recalling Walter Scott ; the acces- 
sory characters are the homeliest and most 
natural imaginable. Auguste Ehrhard, Ibsen's 
French admirer, has pointed out that in his 
subsidiary figures the dramatist is very lifelike 
and his chief characters are usually the mouth- 
pieces of his theories. 

The protagonist of Rosmersholm is Beata. 
She is seldom long absent from each of the 
four acts. She peers over the edges of the dia- 
logue, and in every pause one feels her unseen 
presence. An appalling figure this drowned 
wife, with her staring, fish-like eyes ! She 
revenges herself on the living in the haunted 
brain of her wretched husband, and she exas- 
perates Rebekka, slowly wearing away her op- 
position until the doleful catastrophe. There 
is something both Greek and Gothic in this 
spectral fury, this disquieting Ligeia of the mill- 
dam. 

We find the old hero and heroine obsessed 
by fate, replaced by this neurasthenic pair. 
Q2 



HENRIK IBSEN 

The antique convention is altered, ancient val- 
ues depreciated. A hero is no longer interest- 
ing or heroic ; the heroine, a criminal, is no 
longer sympathetic. Yet we are enthralled by 
this spectacle ; for if cultivated man disdains the 
crude dramatic pictures of lust and cruelty 
admired of his ancestors, he, nevertheless, 
hankers after tragedy. And it is for the mod- 
ern that Ibsen has devised a tragic, ironic 
drama of the soul. In doing this the dramatist 
is the slave of his own epoch, for, to quote 
Goethe again, a genius is in touch with his 
century only by virtue of his defects ; he, too, 
must be an accomplice of his times. 

Brandes has quoted Kierkegaard in relation 
to Ibsen's position : " Let others complain of 
this age as being wicked. I complain of it as 
being contemptible, for it is devoid of passion. 
Men's thoughts are thin and frail as lace, they 
themselves are the weakling lace-makers. The 
thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be 
sinful." Browning has expressed the same 
sentiment in his poem, The Statue and the 
Bust ; Ibsen transformed it into drama. His 
men are dreamers, his women devils; both 
stop short of the great renunciation or the great 
revolt. It is the realization of his failure that 
drives Rosmer and Rebekka with him to death. 
As her strength of will once dominated him, so 
his weakness ultimately overmasters her. She 
is a woman after all, a woman in whom instinct 
has cried so imperiously that it wrecks her soul. 

93 



ICONOCLASTS 

A fiddle may be mended, says Peer Gynt, but a 
bell, never ! A cracked bell might be the symbol 
of this extraordinary drama. 

Rosmersholm has a planetary moral, and not 
a theologic one. And the moral law cannot be 
transcended, he teaches in his elliptical style. 
He is in the uttermost analysis an optimist. 

Those self-indulgent weaklings who seek in 
Ibsen's dramas for confirmation of their medi- 
ocre ideals will be sadly mistaken. Ibsen, if he 
teaches anything, teaches that the ego is a 
source of danger. It is in the delicate relations 
of the sexes that he reveals himself the sym- 
pathetic poet and healer. And what greater 
tragedy on earth is there than an unhappy 
marriage? Ever the moral idea is the motive 
of his plays, the one overarching idea of our 
universe : man's duty to himself, man's duty to 
his neighbour ! That has been the chief concern 
of all the great dramatists, and to its problems 
this poet-psychologist has added his burden of 
the discussion. 

In Rosmersholm we see how the self-decep- 
tions of the man and woman who disregarded 
the natural law and worldly wisdom ruined 
their lives. 

Dr. Wicksteed concludes that "the strength 
and weakness of Ibsen's much-discussed treat- 
ment of marriage lie in the fact that he does 
not deal with it as marriage at all, but as the 
most striking instance of the ever recurrent 
problem of social life, the problem that we ma) 
94 



HENRIK IBSEN 

hide in other cases, but must face here, the 
problem of combining freedom with perma- 
nence and loyalty, of combining self-surrender 
with self-realization." 

Faguet scores Brandes for denying that 
Ibsen alone among dramatists has used the 
symbol in a peculiarly poetic manner, proving 
that if Ibsen is a realist he is also a psycholo- 
gist, who with his lantern illuminates the re- 
cesses of the soul. " For example," writes M. 
Faguet, "in Rosmersholm, northern nature in 
its entirety, with its savageness, its immense 
expanse of space, its broad horizons, its lofty 
heavens, is the symbol, to my mind, of the 
moral liberty to which aspire several characters 
of the play, as, indeed, do half of Ibsen's char- 
acters." Finally, the symbol is above all a 
means for the dramatic poet to give full ex- 
pression to the poetry in his soul ... in Ibsen 
it is essentially a direct product of the author's 
poetic faculty. . . . Up to the present time 
Ibsen is the only dramatic poet to write symbol- 
ical dramas, that is to say, dramas into which 
a symbol is introduced occasionally by way of 
explanation or commentary, or as an element 
of beauty." The symbol, then, is not a sign 
of a weakened imagination, as some bigoted 
"psychiatrists" would have us believe. 

And the interpretation of Rosmersholm! 

Not a half-dozen actresses on the globe have 

grasped the complex skeins of Rebekka West's 

character, and grasping them have been able 

95 






ICONOCLASTS 

to send across the footlights the shivering 
music of her soul. Thus far Scandinavian 
women have best interpreted her to the satis- 
faction of the poet. The Italians are too 
tragic, the French too histrionically brilliant; 
it is a new virtuosity, a new fingering of the 
dramatic keyboard, that is demanded. 

XII 

THE LADY FROM THE SEA 

(1888) 

Told with infinite technical skill, displayed on 
a canvas, the tints of which modulate from dull 
copper to the vague mistiness of a summer sea, 
this mermaid allegory of Ibsen had a charm 
that has almost vanished in the translation and 
vanishes still more at a performance. Ellida 
Wangel, The Lady from the Sea, is the second 
wife of Dr. Wangel, a sensible, healthy bour- 
geois. She is jealous of his dead wife, she is a 
neurotic creature given to reverie and easily im- 
pressed by the strange, the far-away, the poetry 
of distance. In a mood of fantastic excitement 
she once betrothed herself to a stranger, a 
sailor on an American ship. He comes back 
to claim her, and so perfectly adjusted are the 
atmospheric conditions of the drama, that we 
believe she should leave her home and go away 
with this slightly supernatural and old-time ro- 
mantic figure. 

96 



HENRIK IBSEN 

In a stirring interview Ellida lets out the 
truths about her married life to the perplexed 
Wangel — who is a sort of elder brother to 
Helmer, though kinder of heart " You bought 
me," she cries, her bosom overcharged with the 
truth. It is the truth, but then, who cares to 
face domestic truth ? The worthy doctor is sadly 
taken aback. He had married Ellida because 
his children needed a mother; he had — and 
"you bought me all the same," is the cutting 
response. It is so. The man sees the case from 
a different angle, and listens to her story of the 
stranger. She will go when he returns, she 
says. He does return. He does claim her; 
and in the garden scene at the end we see 
a situation Dot unlike that last act of Candida. 
The stranger bids Ellida prepare for departure. 
Wangel, who knows women better than it would 
appear, tells her to go. " Now you can choose 
in freedom and your own responsibility." The 
woman wavers and finally sends the sailor about 
his business. The problem has been solved. 
Ellida can go to her husband of her own free 
will. 

Wicksteed's comment is refreshing. "The 
mere freedom of choice in which Ellida Wangel 
and Nora Helmer lay such stress is but a condi- 
tion, not a principle of healthy life. . . . Without 
the spirit of self-surrender free choice will never 
secure self-realization." This lady of the light- 
house — Ellida was brought up in one — has 
two stepdaughters, the eldest of whom con- 
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ICONOCLASTS 

tracts a loveless marriage, as does Svanhild 
in The Comedy of Love, for the sake of a com- 
fortable home. This parallelism in the sub-plot 
is a favourite device of Ibsen — as though the 
children mimicked the parents. The younger 
daughter later becomes the celebrated Hilda 
Wangel who charms Master Builder Solness to 
his glory and ruin. There is little in her here 
that gives evidence of such potentialities. She 
is rather pert, wild, and self-conscious. The 
men of the play are all excellently sketched. 
The Lady of the Sea, too, presents, in a hazy 
symbol, the old lesson of individuality and free 
choice. But the parable has never been so 
poetically uttered except in Brand. 

It is pleasant to record the impressions of 
a performance of this play at the Lessing 
Theatre, Berlin, September 30, 1904. Director 
Otto Brahm has long been a noted Ibsenite, his 
brochure familiar to all students of the Scan- 
dinavian master. Ibsen, in German, plays de- 
cidedly smoother, with more sonority and an 
abundance of the much-decried "atmosphere." 
The stage settings, as is usual at this artistic 
playhouse, were beautiful. Yet one felt the 
danger of transferring to the boards such an 
imaginative idea. In the hands of Agnes 
Sorma the difficult role of Ellida would not 
have suffered. Irene Triesch, despite her 
unequivocal sincerity, is not temperamentally 
suited to the part. A mermaid who is given 
to morbid reveries and a fierce buccaneer-like 
.8? 



HENRIK IBSEN 

stranger hardly convince us in this miracle- 
hating age. Each time the sailor appeared 
with his big cloak and melodramatic hat I 
expected to hear the theme of the Flying 
Dutchman intoned by an invisible orchestra. 
The human half of the story is more credible. 
Boletta and Hilda are real flesh and blood, 
while the tutor Arnholm, impersonated by that 
excellent character-actor, Emmanuel Reicher, 
was as big a bore as Ibsen probably intended 
him to be. The Lady from the Sea is an at- 
tempt to capture a mood in which Maeterlinck 
might have been more successful. 

XIII 

HEDDA GABLER 

(1890) 

Hedda Gabler is a great play, great despite 
its unpleasant theme, and also remarkable, inas- 
much as its subject-matter is essentially undra- 
matic — " the picture hot of an action but of a 
condition," as Henry James puts it. The Nor- 
wegian poet usually begins to develop his drama 
where other writers end theirs. Yet so wonder- 
ful is his art that we are treated to no long ex* 
planations, no retrospective speeches; indeed, 
the text of an Ibsen play is little more than a 
series of memoranda for the players. Cuvier- 
like, the actor must reconstruct a living human 
from a mere bone of a word. These words 
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ICONOCLASTS 

seem detached, seem meaningless, yet in action 
their cohesiveness is unique ; dialogue melts 
into dialogue, action is dovetailed to action, 
and fleeting gestures reveal a state of soul. 
Ibsen does not read as well as he acts. He 
is extremely difficult to interpret for the reason 
that the old technic of the actor is inadequate, 
as Bernard Shaw long ago declared. 

One merit of the piece is its absence of liter- 
ary flavour. It is a slice of life. In his prose 
dramas, Ibsen throws overboard the entire bag- 
gage of " literary " effects. He who had worked 
so successfully in the field of the poetic legen- 
dary and historic drama ; who had fashioned 
that mighty trilogy Brand, Peer Gynt, and 
Emperor and Galilean, saw that a newer rubric 
must be found for the delineation of modern 
men and women, of modern problems. So 
style is absent in his later plays — style in the 
rhetorical sense. Revolutionist as he is, he is 
nevertheless a formalist of the old school in 
his adherence to the classic unities. In Hedda 
Gabler the action is compressed within a space of 
about thirty-six hours, in one room, and with a 
handful of persons. One is tempted to say that 
the principal action occurs before the play or 
"off" the stage during its progress. We may 
see that Hedda does little throughout. Yet, 
through some magical impartment of the drama- 
tist, we seem to be in possession of the charac- 
teristic facts of her nature before she arrives 
on the scene. Concision does not alone explain 
ioo 



HENRIK IBSEN 

this, it may be noticed in other plays of the 
Norwegian. It is the dramaturgic gift raised 
to its highest power, though that power be 
expended upon base metal. Why Ibsen pre- 
ferred a Hedda to an Isolde is a question that 
would lead us into devious paths. 

In Hedda Gabler all lyricism is sternly sup- 
pressed. As if the master had determined to 
punish himself for his championing of individu- 
alism in his earlier plays, he draws the portrait 
of one who might easily figure as a Nietzschean 
Super- Woman. Preaching that the state is the 
foe of the individual, that only revolution — 
spiritual revolution — can regenerate society, 
that the superior man and woman are lonely, 
that individual liberty must be fought for at all 
hazards, — liberty of thought, speech, action, — 
Ibsen then deliberately shows the free woman, 
one emancipated from the beliefs of her family 
circle and her country. She epitomizes the 
latter-day anti-social being and is rightfully 
considered by psychologists as a flaming sign 
of the times, a brief for the social democrats. 

With remorseless logic and an implacable 
analysis Ibsen discovers to our gaze this bare 
soul. We see Hedda at school, a discontented, 
restless girl, envious of her companions, con- 
scious of her own superiority, mental and physi- 
cal, cruel and overbearing. Little, timid Thea 
Rysing, with the crown of white-gold hair, wavy, 
copious, excites anger in the breast of the badly 
balanced Hedda. She pulls the hair and would 
IOI 



ICONOCLASTS 

lelight to see it burn. After all, is she not 
General Gabler's daughter, an aristocrat, though 
a poor one ! She goes into society and has 
admirers. Few attract her. They are either 
too stupid or not rich enough. In this danger- 
ous predicament, jelly-like and drifting, she en- 
counters Eiljert Lovborg, a young man of genius 
— at least Ibsen says he is ; he has certainly the 
temperament of erratic genius, though at no time 
does he betray the possession of higher gifts. 
Yet an interesting man, a romancing idealist, 
a deceiver of himself as well as of the women 
before whom he masquerades and poses in the 
role of the misunderstood and persecuted. He 
is first cousin to Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild 
Duck, one of those egotists of the self-pitying, 
elegiac kind who weeps when he regards in the 
mirror his own sentimental features. 

Despite her hardness, vanity, selfishness, 
Hedda is taken in by this clever fellow. Like 
Emma Bovary (though socially more elevated) 
she is at heart an incorrigible romantic and 
very snobbish. Modish elegance is her notion 
of the universe, and a saddle horse with a man 
in livery discreetly following her as she dashes 
through the crowded park represents to her 
the top notch of mundane happiness. Lovborg 
is a born liar. He has personal address, is 
undoubtedly a man of brains, and dissipated 
as he is manages to surround his loose living 
with the halo of Byronism. His debauches, he 
believes, are the result of a finely strung nature 
103 



HENRIK IBSEN 

in conflict with a prosaic world. Hedda sympa- 
thizes with this view. She does more. She 
becomes morbidly interested in his doings and 
asks imprudent questions which the man right- 
fully construes as evidences of desire for the 
life he describes. He makes his first error. 
It is Hedda's opportunity and she avails her- 
self of it. Naturally theatric, she seizes her 
father's pistol — there is a brace of old cavalry 
pistols which play an important role throughout 
— and threatens Lovborg. He leaves her and 
pretends that he is going to the dogs, but in 
reality quits the city and takes a position in a 
country family, there to find a more credulous 
victim, Thea, now the wife of Sheriff Elvsted. 

Remember that these experiences are not 
shown on the stage. Deftly conveyed by the 
dramatic stenography of Ibsen, the audience 
absorb the facts almost unconsciously; and 
when the curtain falls on Act II, we seem to 
have known the Gablers, Tesmans, Lovborg, and 
Thea for years. And all the time Ibsen is not 
overstepping the traditional territory of the 
drama ; his Lovborg and Hedda, his Thea and 
George, his Brack — are they not, in their 
relative position, stock figures for any classic 
comedy ? George Tesman is own brother to 
Georges Dandin and twin to Charles Bovary. 
He belongs to that large army of husbands 
called by Balzac " the predestined." His beard, 
eyes, nose, — above all his nose, — speech, gait, 
clothes, are they not so many stigmata of the 
103 



ICONOCLASTS 

man whose wife will deceive him ? The beauty 
of the situation is that Hedda does not betray 
George, and yet she seems more criminal than 
the timid Thea, who boldly deserts her old hus- 
band to follow the scapegrace Lbvborg. Hedda 
is the woman on the brink, the adulteress in 
thought, the eternal type of one whose will is 
weakened by egoism. Her soul, its roots nur- 
tured in rank soil, has expanded secretly into a 
monstrous growth. Her whole life has been one 
of concealment. She has lied, presumably, in 
her girlhood, as she lies in the married state. 
She is never happy except when teasing a 
man. Laura Marholm paints her portrait as the 
dttraqnee : " Her wanton curiosity, her constant 
longing, inflame the decadent and appeal directly 
to his sensuality ; but her cowardice and disin- 
clination to satisfaction drive her forever from 
attack to flight, and no sooner has she retreated 
than she stretches forth her antennae and gropes 
for him again. To see man feverish — that is 
what she lives upon ; if she cannot have this 
atmosphere about her, she becomes sallow, hol- 
low-cheeked, and hysteric." 

Here is Hedda Gabler sketched in a few words. 
A cold heart, a cool head, curious but not sen- 
sual, combined with a cowardly fear of the con- 
ventions — a snobbish tribute to virtues in which 
she does not believe — these sent Hedda Gabler 
to her destruction, to that Button-moulder who 
fashions anew the souls of the useless in his 
cosmic dust-heap. She went through her life 
104 



HENRIK IBSEN 

with the chip of chastity on her shoulder; yet 
dare a man approach her and she is in the 
throes of mock virtue. She made Lovborg 
feel this. Brack, with the measuring eye 
of a worldly man, was not deceived by her 
tantrums ; he saw the essential baseness of the 
creature. 

Hedda stands for a certain order of her sex — 
not the " strong-minded " or " advanced " — that 
is, happily, in the minority. In Ibsen's judg- 
ment she is doomed to failure because she did 
not dare far enough. She feared to sin, not be- 
cause of scrupulosity, but because of the world's 
opinion. If she ever allowed tender feelings to 
usurp the hard image of herself enthroned in 
her soul, they were for Lovborg. He struck 
in her a depraved chord of feeling. Both 
loved pleasure. Both took the seeming for 
actuality. If there is one thing that discredits 
Lovborg's claim as a man of genius, it is his 
worship of trivial things. The scholar, the phi- 
losopher, the poet, seek pleasure, seek the gratifi- 
cation of the senses ; but Lovborg's attitude is 
too base. He is worthy of Hedda's admiration, 
and Hedda's only. 

With his incomparable irony Ibsen gives the 
victory to the weak, to the stupid. We may fore- 
see the future of George and Thea when the 
shock of battle has passed. Both, dull per- 
sons, plodding, painstaking, absolutely devoid of 
humour, settle down to a peaceful existence over 
the " great " work of the dead Lovborg. It is 
105 



ICONOCLASTS 

all piteous, all hopelessly banal — and it is also 
daily life to its central core. 

To assert that Hedda's acts were alone the 
result of her condition would be to place the 
drama within the category of the pathologic. 
Rather is the point made that, despite her ap- 
proaching motherhood, Hedda's manifest dis- 
gust at any reference to it is a sign of her 
deep-seated depravity. She loathes children, 
especially a child of Tesman. She is too selfish 
to enter, even imaginatively, into the joys of 
maternity. Ibsen notes % this when he puts into 
George's mouth the silly speech about young 
wives and the burning of the manuscript. Hedda 
is, on the contrary, less hysterical and more self- 
contained after marriage than before. Nothing 
could be more damnably cold-blooded than her 
deliberate manipulation of Lovborg's vain nature. 
Only at the grate as she burns the manuscript 
and in the outburst of wild music preceding her 
suicide are the demoniac forces of her nature 
unloosed. 

The former act is, nevertheless, controlled by 
a slow, cautious hate, and the latter occurs off 
the stage ; the pistol shot is the final punctuation 
mark to this destructive, restless existence. No, 
Ibsen aimed at something more profound than 
exhibition of maternal hysteria. The causes of 
Hedda's behaviour dated back to her girlhood. 
She was perverse, how perverse we see in her 
shameless confession that she had led George to 
an avowal simply because she wanted the com- 
106 



HENRIK IBSEN 

fortable Falk villa for a residence. Her revolt 
against life was bounded by her petty appetites, 
nothing more ; and for this reason she is an in- 
valuable " human document." 

Removed from her cramping environments 
Hedda would have developed along more normal 
lines ; and herein lies the beauty of Ibsen's prob- 
lem, Ibsen who always asks questions ■ — like 
Rembrandt in his Night Watch with its mystic 
daylight. Hedda might have become an actress 
or a circus rider, anything less evil than her 
position as the trouble-breeding wife of Tesman. 
By enclosing her within the Tesman walls, sur- 
rounding her with stupid and dissipated people, 
she was driven in upon herself, and passing from 
one mood of exasperation to another she finally 
became shipwrecked. As Allan Monkhouse 
writes, " Hedda Gabler is a personification of 
ennui, a daring effort of imagination, a great 
piece of construction, a study of essentials with 
all accidental human element omitted, a work 
indeed not of realism, though surrounded by 
realistic details, but belonging rather to such 
ideal art as the Melancholia of Albert Diirer." 
Mr. Monkhouse could have quoted La Bruyere 
about "opposition truths that illuminate one 
another." Hedda Gabler is one of those " oppo- 
sition truths" that illuminate an entire section 
of her sex. 

Technically, Ibsen has not surpassed himself 
in this work. Never has he woven his patterns 
so densely — the pattern of character and the 
107 



ICONOCLASTS 

pattern of action. As in a dream we divine the 
past of the humans he sets strutting before us, 
and we leave the theatre as if obsessed by an 
ugly nightmare. Those who condemn the char- 
acters are compelled perforce to admire the cun- 
ning workmanship, and no greater error can be 
committed than supposing the two may be dis- 
entangled. Study carefully the play, study 
carefully its performance, and then despair at 
separating the characterization from the purely 
formal elements. Here matter and manner are 
merged perfectly. We note a few symbolic 
catchwords, such as "vine leaves," but they 
serve their spiritual as well as their technical 
purpose. The pistols, too, are cunningly pre- 
pared agents of ruin. We also wonder why 
George is such a blind fool ; why Thea so soon 
consoles herself, with Lovborg's body still warm ; 
why Lovborg, who despises Tesman, should be 
anxious to show him his new work. But, to 
quote Mr. James again : " There are many 
things in the world that are past finding out, 
and one of them is whether the subject of a 
work had not better have been another subject. 
We shall always do well to leave that matter to 
the author ; he may have some secret for solving 
the riddle, so terrible would his revenge easily 
become if he were to accept a responsibility for 
his theme." And further : " The ' use ' of 
Hedda Gabler is that she acts on others, and 
that even her most disagreeable qualities have 
the privilege, thoroughly undeserved doubtless, 
108 



HENRIK IBSEN 

but equally irresistible, of becoming a part of 
the history of others. And then one isn't so 
sure that she is wicked, and by no means sure 
that she is disagreeable. She is various and 
sinuous and graceful, complicated and natural ; 
she suffers, she struggles, she is human, and 
by that fact exposed to a dozen different in- 
terpretations, to the importunity of our sus- 
pense. . . ." 

This seems to be a final judgment — if judg- 
ments of Ibsen can be final — upon a woman, 
who, all said, is human enough to suffer, suffer 
principally because she feared to sin. She is 
not a caricature of the " modern " woman. If 
she had become conscious of the claims of 
others, in a word the modern, unselfish, eman- 
cipated woman, her life would have been dif- 
ferent — and the theatre deprived of a most 
fascinating and enigmatic figure, with her pallid 
skin, her haunting gray eyes, her sweet, studied 
languor, and her delicate air of one to whom 
life owes its richest gifts. 

Dr. Wicksteed, in his admirable lectures on 
Ibsen, remarks : " I am convinced that it is in 
this typical significance of marriage, and not 
in any special interest in the so-called woman 
question as such, that we are to seek the reason 
of Ibsen's constant recurrence to this theme 
Suppress individuality and you have no life; 
assert it, and you have war and chaos. . . . 
Hedda Gabler neither drifted nor was forced 
into marriage, but she deliberately and shame 
109 



ICONOCLASTS 

lessly paid the flattered and delighted Tesman 
in the forged coinage of love for opening to her 
a retreat from the career she had exhausted, and 
entry into the best career she could still think of 
as possible, and we see the result. Without the 
spirit of self-surrender, free choice will never 
secure self-realization." 

Her death, sought because of cowardly rea- 
sons, is yet the one real fact in Hedda's shallow, 
feverish existence. Death could alone solve the 
discords of her life's cruel music. 

XIV 

THE MASTER BUILDER 

(1892) 

The doctor of the madhouse at Cairo, in 
which Peer Gynt crowns himself Emperor of 
Himself, said of his "patients": "Each one 
shuts himself up in the cask of self, plunges 
down deep in the ferment of self. He's her- 
metically sealed with the bung of self, and he 
tightens the staves in the well of self. None 
has a tear for another's woes, none has a sense 
for another's ideas. Ourselves — that's what 
we are in thought and in speech ; ourselves 
to the outmost plank of the springboard." 

Such a sealed soul was that of Halvard Sol- 

ness before Hilda Wangel knocked at his door 

to demand of him the fulfilment of his promise. 

Ten years earlier he had promised to make her 

I!0 



HENRIK IBSEN 

a princess. She was then a child and had 
excitedly waved a flag when she saw Solness 
in the pride of his manhood, the greatest of the 
architects, climb to the top of the scaffolding 
that surrounded the newly completed church 
and hang a wreath on the weather-vane. Her 
enthusiasm had pleased the artist, and a kiss 
was given with the promise. Her knock is as 
revolutionary as the open door of Nora's house 
of dolls. As Hilda enters she brings with her 
brilliant young womanhood, the fresh breeze 
of the new century. It was needed in the 
unhappy Solness household. 

Halvard lost his former home through a fire ; 
it was the beginning of his luck in life and also 
the date of his unhappiness. His children died 
soon after the affair, and his wife's mind became 
morbid over the loss. 

" Is it not frightful," he tells Hilda, " that 
I must now go about and reckon it up, pay for 
it ? — not with money, but with human happi- 
ness. And not merely my own ; with that of 
others, too. Do you see that, Hilda ? That is 
what my artistic success has cost me — and 
others. And every livelong day I must go 
about and see the price paid for me anew. 
Again, and again, and still again." 

Several fixed ideas haunt this man's brain. 
He has become moody, even surly, because 
he suspects the younger generation of treason 
to him. As he supplanted old Brovik, the 
broken-down architect in his employ, so he fears 
in 



ICONOCLASTS 

that the son, Knut Brovik, will supplant him 
He has, being a man loved by women, won 
power over Knut's betrothed. He believes 
that he has the rare gift of willing a thing, a 
telepathic power. He is not mad but over- 
wrought, and Hilda's visit is in the nature of 
a rescue. She is the fairy princess who is to 
rescue him from the evil Ego, in which he is 
imprisoned as if in an ogre's cage. 

Georg Brandes writes of The Master Builder: 
11 It gives at one and the same time a sense of 
enthralment and a sense of deliverance. This 
is a play that echoes and reechoes in our minds 
long after we have read it. . . . Great is its art, 
profound and rich in its symbolic language. . . . 
Ibsen's intention has been to give us by means 
of real characters, but in half-allegorical form, 
the tragedy of a great artist who has passed the 
prime of life." 

And as the Danish critic aptly remarks, in 
his — Ibsen's — case, " Realism and symbolism 
have thriven very well together for more than a 
score of years. The contrasts in his nature in- 
cline him at once to fidelity, to fact, and to mys- 
ticism." This accounts in part for the puzzling 
naivete of the dialogue, externally so simple that 
it delights children. Symbolic figures are em- 
ployed throughout, with repetitions of motives 
as in a symphonic composition. These buttress 
up a structure that might otherwise dissolve 
in fantastic smoke, so aerial is its thesis. 

The various acts are mainly composed of a 

112 



HENRIK IBSEN 

duologue between Hilda and Halvard. Grad- 
ually she obtains by her terrible intensity and 
child-like belief in him complete control of his 
self-absorbed will. She drives him to sign a 
letter of praise for the youthful architect, Knut, 
his possible rival; she sends the other girl 
away ; she is kind to Aline, the unhappy wife. 
Hilda is, as Ibsen said, a reversed Hedda Gabler. 
She has much of Rebekka West in her, with 
added youth and a nature buoyant enough to 
triumph over the Solness ideals, just as she 
would have compelled Rosmersholm to go down 
into the world and ennoble men. She dis- 
covers Solness's intention to build no more, to 
climb no more to the top of high turrets. It 
pains her to think that her part, her master 
builder, the incarnation of her maidenly dreams, 
dares no longer mount in company with his 
ideals. He will build no more churches, only 
houses for human beings. There may be a 
castle in the air where he will find his happi- 
ness — with Hilda. 

" I'm afraid you would turn dizzy before we 
got halfway up," she says. 

" Not if I can mount in hand with you, 
Hilda," he replies. 

"Then let me see you stand free and high 
up." But alone, he must mount to the top of 
the new tower. She urges him after the man- 
ner of Peter Skule in The Pretenders, as did 
Rebekka in Rosmersholm. She will not stand 
between Aline and Halvard, for she now knows 
113 



ICONOCLASTS 

Aline. Otherwise her moral life is as free as 
Nietzsche's. So Solness marches up the scaf- 
folding, up the ladder to the very pinnacle, for- 
getting that life has but one pinnacle to scale, 
and never a second. Her ecstasy as she 
watches him reach the top, be once more the 
old genius, his real self, Halvard Solness, that 
she cheers him and — he falls. Unconscious 
that he is dead, apparently not caring for the 
woe brought to this house, Hilda calls out until 
the curtain hides her from view : — 

" My — my master builder ! " And he is 
really hers, for she has created his soul anew. 
That is the meaning of this difficult and lovely 
fable, — though he fell to his death, Solness 
once more stood alone on the heights. 

Maurice Maeterlinck has written most clearly 
on the theme of this play. 

"Some time ago," he says in The Treasure 
of the Humble (translated by Alfred Sutro), 
"when dealing with The Master Builder, which 
is the one of Ibsen's dramas wherein the dia- 
logue of the second degree attains the deepest 
tragedy, I endeavoured, unskilfully enough, to 
fit its secrets. . . . ■ What is it,' I asked, ' what is 
it that, in The Master Builder, the poet has added 
to life, thereby making it appear so strange, so 
profound, so disquieting, beneath its trivial sur- 
face ? The discovery is not easy, and the old 
master hides from us more than one secret. It 
would even seem as though what he has wished 
to say were but little by the side of what he has 
114 



HENRIK rBSEN 

been compelled to say. He has freed certain 
powers of the soul that have never yet been 
free, and it may be that these have held him 
in thrall.' 

" ' Look you, Hilda,' exclaims Solness, ' look 
you ! There is sorcery in you, too, as there is 
in me. It is this sorcery that imposes action on 
the powers of the beyond. And we have to yield 
to it. Whether we want to or not, we must. There 
is sorcery in them as in us all.' Hilda and Sol- 
ness are, I believe, the first characters in drama 
who feel, for an instant, that they are living in 
the atmosphere of the soul; and the discovery 
of this essential life that exists in them, beyond 
the life of every day, comes fraught with terror. 
Hilda and Solness are two souls to whom a 
flash has revealed their situation in the true 
life. . . . Their conversation resembles noth- 
ing that we have ever heard, inasmuch as the 
poet has endeavoured to blend in one expres- 
sion both the inner and outer dialogue. A new, 
indescribable power dominates this somnambu- 
listic drama. All that is said therein at once 
hides and reveals the sources of an unknown 
life." 

A true interior drama then is The Master 
Builder, full of the overtones, the harmonies, of 
mundane existence. Never has Ibsen's art been 
so clairvoyant. 



"5 



ICONOCLASTS 

XV 

LITTLE EYOLF 

(1894) 

Little Eyolf is a moving drama of resignation. 
It does not sparkle with the gem-like brilliancy 
of Hedda Gabler, it is not so swiftly dramatic, 
nor has it the sombre power of Ghosts, nor yet 
the intimacy of A Doll's House ; but it is pro- 
foundly pathetic, and the means employed by 
Ibsen to produce his greatest effects are simple 
in the extreme. 

The story is this : Alfred Allmers has mar- 
ried a girl with " gold and green forests " ; Rita 
is her name. They have one child, Eyolf, a 
sweet little boy, but lame from a fall. The 
sister of Allmers is named Asta. She has the 
true savour of the Ibsen woman. She visits 
the Allmers at their country home. Alfred has 
just come back from an excursion of six weeks 
in the mountains, a lonely, self-imposed tour. 
He is a delicate young man of lofty ideals, not 
as yet realized in his work. There is something 
incomplete about him. He reminds one a trifle 
of Hedda Gabler's husband, but while he i& 
about as talented he is not quite so dense. He 
has a life work, a volume to be written, which 
he calls Human Responsibility. But he is a 
dreamer and has done little with it. He is 
wrapped up in his boy and dedicates his life to 
him. In Little Eyolf shall happily blossom alj 
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HENRIK IBSEN 

the painful buds of his own impotent ambitions 
Alfred Allmers has the vision, but not the voice. 
He is a type. 

But his wife, a full-blooded, impetuous woman, 
feels that she is being denied her rights through 
this absorbing passion of the father for his son. 
Her nature hungers for more than child love. 
She loves her husband fiercely and fails to 
understand his coolness. Then what Ibsen calls 
a Rat- Wife appears. The Rat- Wife is only a 
woman with a dog that goes about catching and 
killing rats. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, 
she plays upon a little pipe and the rats follow 
her to the water and are drowned. " Just be- 
cause they want not to — because they're so 
deadly afraid of the water — that's why they've 
got to plunge into it," says this horrid old bel- 
dame of the naughty perverse rodents. She 
has lured other game — human game — in her 
early days, and Little Eyolf is transfixed by her 
glittering eye, as Coleridge hath it. 

He follows her music as far as the water and 
is drowned. The act is vital and searching in 
its analysis of character. With a few powerful 
strokes we get Rita, Asta, Alfred, the Rat- Wife ; 
and the poor lame chap, with his hankering after 
a soldier's life, is very sad. 

The contention between Alfred and Rita, 
husband and wife, in the next act, goes to the 
very springs of their souls. We learn that Rita 
is jealous of her little boy — the dead, drowned 
boy, whose open, upturned, and staring eyes 
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ICONOCLASTS 

haunt her. Alfred upbraids her for her neglect 
of the child, and declares that he would be alive 
if it were not for her carelessness. Being lame 
he was not taught to swim like other lads, and 
the lameness was caused by a fall from a table. 
Rita had left him asleep on the table, safe as she 
thought, and then the accident occurred. The 
husband protests in a low voice that he too for- 
got, "You, you, you, lured me to you — I forgot 
the child — in your arms." 

The two lay bare their very thoughts. Alfred 
has really never loved Rita. Her gold and green 
forests and her beauty led him to marry her. 
His craze for the boy further removed him from 
his wife, and his intellectual life was not con- 
ducive to perfect sympathy. He wished his lad 
to be a prodigy. He meant him to do in the 
world all the father had not. The scene is a 
poignant one. The mother, very human woman 
of considerable temperament, is almost broken- 
hearted at the double loss. The child's death 
was a blow, but her husband's dislike drives her 
frantic. The child, young as he was, had re- 
pelled her. She felt barred from the wealth of 
love that flourished between father and child. 
She resented it. She resented the child's love 
for Asta, for Asta proves to be a very formi- 
dable factor in the play. She is jealous of 
everybody. 

Alfred Allmers is just a bit of a prig, self- 
conscious like most people with a self-imposed 
mission in life, and doubtless possessing in full 



HENRIK IBSEN 

measure the scholar's peevishness. The sister 
Asta is a woman with an awful secret. She can 
give her suitor Borgheim no hopes. She loves 
her brother's child to distraction, and she knows 
of her mother's dishonour. To Rita she is not 
altogether sympathetic. She takes from her 
Eyolf 's love, the love he should have bestowed 
on his mother, and she is evidently held in high 
intellectual favour by her husband. Naturally 
Rita, who has lifted up both the Allmers by her 
wealth, feels all this. She, confesses it, too, to 
her husband. He has become morbid, unmanned, 
hysterical, since the accident. All his hopes are 
dashed to earth and shattered. He conceives a 
horrible fear for his wife. The interview is a 
prolonged one and intensely painful. It is writ- 
ten with supreme art and conveys volumes in 
half-uttered sentences. There are no really long 
speeches, the dialogue being crisp, and while 
the action is not rapid, three lives' histories are 
told with consummate art and unabated vigour. 
Asta has then a scene with her brother. She 
tells him that she is not his sister ; her mother 
was not all she should have been to his father. 
Brother and sister face each other, and their 
parting at the end of the act is another of those 
strangely affecting climaxes Ibsen builds so well. 
There is never shown a hint of warmer feelings 
between the two than their supposed relation- 
ship warrants. Eyolf, Eyolf! it is always the 
spirit of the child that directs the doings of this 
strange yet ordinary group of human beings. 
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ICONOCLASTS 

Allmers later suggests suicide to his wife, and 
the awful contingency is discussed. The tone 
of Little Eyolf is distinctly optimistic. Hope is 
preached on every page. Alfred and Rita clasp 
hands and take up their life work as it lies be- 
fore them in the squalid village that belongs to 
them. Asta goes away with Borgheim, leaving 
a flavour of the mystic behind her. She is a 
true Ibsen girl. Little Eyolf is the lodestar of 
Allmers ever after. The play seems on its 
surface to be a powerful preachment against 
dilettanteism. Writing a book about Human 
Responsibility is all well enough, but out in the 
thick of the fight is a man's place. Assume the 
responsibilities of common humanity. Do not 
talk about them. The relations of parents to 
children are fully exploited, and the lesson read 
is that parents owe much to each other, quite 
as much as to their children. 

Ibsen has girded at the conventionalities of 
the marriage relation in other plays. This is his 
Kreutzer Sonata. He shows the selfishness of 
a parent's love. Rita and Alfred confess that 
they never truly understood Eyolf, for they never 
knew each other. It is a profound character 
study. Ibsen was writing for another theatre 
■ — the theatre of the twentieth century. He has, 
like Maeterlinck, abjured the drama of poison, 
mystery, conflict, violence, aye, even the drama 
of heroism. He is a sorcerer who reveals to us 
the commonplace of life in other symbols. We 
are surrounded by mystery. Life at its lowest 
1 20 



HENRIK IBSEN 

term is a profound mystery. Science may tabu 
late, but the poet draws aside the veil. 

To dip below the surface of Ibsen's lines is 
never a grateful task, especially if the dramatic 
idea is first taken into consideration. Psychology 
must play the principal role in any estimate of 
Little Eyolf as a play pure and simple. Lan- 
guage is symbolic, though with Ibsen the single 
word is never as important as it is with Maeter- 
linck. So we find little of that dripping repe- 
tition, that haunting reiteration which the 
Belgian writer may have borrowed from Edgar 
Allan Poe. The ellipsis in Ibsen is cunningly 
contrived, he subtly foreshadows coming events, 
but never by the Word Beautiful. Little Eyolf 
depicts the tyranny of passion. 

XVI 

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN 

(1896) 

There is in John Gabriel Borkman logical, 
well-knit construction. There is an unflinching 
criticism of life — the attitude of a man who 
began life as a poet and ends it as a realist; 
there is a strange power, unpleasant power, a 
meagre intensity, yet unquestionable intensity, 
and a genius for character-drawing and develop- 
ment of character that is just short of the mar- 
vellous. That Ibsen has chosen his characters 
from the world about him — a provincial, narrow 

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ICONOCLASTS 

hard, cold world, — is a commentary on his truth 
fulness, on his adherence to realistic principles. 
The curious part of this is the resemblance his 
bourgeois people bear to the bourgeois of nearly 
every civilized country. 

John Gabriel Borkman is a play of great 
power, of a frugal, constructive beauty, and in 
it from first to last there sounds faintly but dis- 
tinctly an antique note. There is also something 
of a Hamlet situation in the position of the young 
man who might have won back his father's king- 
dom, but quite like a modern Hamlet solved 
the knotty problem by going away to Paris ; any 
place, far away from the bleak northern world 
where lived in a gloomy house his father, an 
ex-convict, his mother, a soured fanatic, and his 
aunt, an old maid and an idealist. 

John Gabriel Borkman, thirteen years previous 
to the opening of the play, had been a gigantic 
speculator. All Norway, all the world, would 
have been at his feet if he had not failed at the 
moment when success seemed assured. By his 
downfall hundreds were enmeshed in ruin, and 
the man went to prison for five years, leaving 
behind a heartbroken wife and a young son. 
This boy, Erhart, was taken away and raised by 
a rich aunt, but is now at home, where he has 
lived for eight years when the curtain rises. 

Mrs. Borkman is discovered in her old-fash- 
ioned drawing-room, in the house saved out of 
the wreckage by her twin sister, Ella Rentheim. 
She is longing for the return of her son Erhart, 

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HENRIK IBSEN 

in whom she discerns the saviour of the family. 
Her sister enters, and in his own remarkable, 
sharp way Ibsen lets us witness the spiritual 
tragedy in the lives of the pair. They both love 
Erhart, as formerly Ella had loved his father, 
John Gabriel Borkman. The women hate each 
other, and their duel is fought out in half -uttered 
sentences, pregnant pauses, and deadly glances. 
It is the perfection of dialogue-writing and clear 
exposition. You catch dim perspectives of the 
past, the treachery of the husband of Mrs. Bork- 
man, and of darker depths which are later ex- 
plored. The mother — oh, such a pitiful, harsh, 
sorrowful, repellent mother, nursing her injuries 
until they become hissing vipers in her bosom 

— defies her sister to win away the love of her 
son, that son she has dedicated to the mission of 
rehabilitating the fortunes and good name of the 
Borkmans. With cutting humility she acknowl- 
edges that she eats the bread of her sister's 
charity, and then they hear footsteps. Is it 
Erhart returning ? No ; it is some one up in the 
long gallery overhead ! It is the ex-convict, ex- 
banker, and swindler, John Gabriel Borkman, 
who has never left the house since his release 
eight years before. Mrs. Borkman cries : — 

" It sometimes seems more than I can endure 

— always to hear him up there walking, walking. 
From the first thing in the morning to the last 
thing at night. And one hears every step so 
plainly ! I have often felt as if I had a sick 
wolf up there, prowling up and down in a cage, 

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ICONOCLASTS 

Right over my head, too! Listen! there he 
goes. Up and down, up and down, the wolf is 
prowling." 

Then Erhart, a lively young man of about 
twenty-three, enters, welcomes his aunt affec- 
tionately, his mother carelessly. With him is 
a Mrs. Wilton, a beautiful young woman, whose 
husband has deserted her. The pair are in love, 
although the mother does not quite see it. Mrs. 
Wilton wishes Erhart to go with her to a neigh- 
bor's house, a Mr. Hinkle's, but his duty is at home 
and she leaves him, the air being promise-crammed 
with tantalizing hopes of pleasure and caprice. 
The young man soon tires of the bickerings about 
him, and after declaring that his aunt should be 
in bed after her long journey, leaves his mother 
alone, and as the curtain falls she exclaims : 
" Erhart, Erhart, be true to me ! Oh, come 
home and help your mother! For I can bear 
this life no longer." 

Her mother's heart tells her that her boy is 
being drawn away from her, drawn by some 
force she cannot analyze. 

In Act II we get a picture of the " sick wolf 
up there," John Gabriel Borkman himself. He 
is one of Ibsen's most veracious portraits. He 
clings with unshaken obstinacy to the belief 
that he only sinned against himself, that if he 
had been given time, that if he had not been 
betrayed by a false friend, he would have pulled 
through. All these facts are deftly brought out 
by conversation with the half-pathetic, half-ludi- 
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HENRIK IBSEN 

crous figure of an humble bank clerk, the only 
one of Borkman's friends who has clung to him 
in his reverses, although Borkman has swept 
away his poor earnings. The contrast of the 
pair — Borkman, almost satanic in his pride and 
his belief that he will eventually regain his posi- 
tion in society, and the feeble aspirations of the 
poor clerk, who is a poetaster — is wonderfully 
managed. There is a quarrel, and Borkman is 
left to his gloomy thoughts, and then Ella Ren- 
theim comes in and one of the most powerful 
situations of the play ensues. 

It has developed that Borkman has always 
loved Ella, but gave her up and married her 
sister because an influential man who could 
advance his interests was also in love with Ella. 
This man, not being able to marry her, betrayed 
Borkman and his schemes. His name is Hinkle, 
and at his very house that night, near Christiania 
(the scene of the play), Erhart Borkman is enjoy- 
ing himself with Mrs. Wilton and not caring a 
rap for his sick-souled father, mother, and aunt. 

When Borkman finally acknowledges to Ella 
that in his lust for power he has sacrificed his 
love of her, and has sacrificed it uselessly, she 
turns on him and cries " Criminal ! " She goes 
on: — 

" You are a murderer and you have committed 
the one mortal sin. . . . You have killed the 
love life in me. Do you understand what that 
means ? The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin 
for which there is no forgiveness. I have never 

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ICONOCLASTS 

understood what it could be ; but now I under- 
stand. The great, unpardonable sin is to murder 
the love life in a human soul. . . . You have 
done that. I have never rightfully understood 
until this evening what has really happened to 
me. That you deserted me and turned to Gun- 
hild instead — I took that to be mere common 
fickleness on your part, and the result of heart- 
less scheming on hers. I almost think I despise 
you a little in spite of everything. But now I 
see it ! You deserted the woman you loved ! 
Me, me, me ! What you held dearest in the 
world you were ready to barter away for gain. 
That is the double murder you have committed ! 
The murder of your own soul and mine ! " 

And again, "You have cheated me of a 
mother's joy and happiness in life — and a 
mother's sorrows and tears as well." 

Then Ella tells Borkman that sorrow and 
disease have broken her down, and she intends 
leaving her fortune to Erhart, the only one she 
loves ; her spiritual son, but he must give up 
the name of Borkman and take that of Ren- 
theim. Mrs. Borkman appears at this juncture, 
and there is another clash as the curtain falls on 
three wretched people. 

Act III treads closely on the heels of the 
preceding one, for the action of the entire play 
takes place during one dull winter's evening; 
and if there is unity of time, unity of place, 
there is unity of character, for like some vast 
but closely knitted polyphonic composition, the 
126 



HENRIK IBSEN 

piece contains not a line, not a character, that 
is wasted or undeveloped. It is as far as form 
simply magnificent; an object lesson to young 
dramatists. But as to its theme; ah, I, too, 
would be sorry to see our stage always filled 
with these crabbed, sour, mean, loveless, and 
sad-visaged people ! Little wonder that joyous 
Erhart Borkman, the selfish son of a union bar- 
ren of love, goes away in Act III, after a cli- 
max that simply cuts into your nerves. Father 
and mother — oh, the agony of that poor, old, 
weak, deserted woman — appeal to him, but 
with Mrs. Wilton and a young girl, a daughter 
of the old clerk, he goes out into the world to 
see life, to seek love, to enjoy, to enjoy, to enjoy ! 
It is the new laughing at the despair of the old, 
and the curtain falls on a group that seems 
frozen with antique grief. 

Of Act IV and Borkman's death — his soul 
had been dead since he went to prison — I shall 
say but little. The end is silver-tipped with 
symbolical hintings, but there is nothing dark 
or devious for even the commonest comprehen- 
sion. 

The spiritual director of the Theatre de 
l'CEuvre, M. Lugne-Poe, once wrote of Ibsen 
thus : — 

" I do not know any one but M. August 
Ehrhard who has, with such painstaking erudi- 
tion, disengaged Ibsen's thought from his prin- 
cipal works. And although the learned critic 
committed the great fault of never attempting 
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ICONOCLASTS 

one single time to assimilate the rugged thought 
of the great dramaturge, it must, nevertheless, 
be allowed his conclusions were happy. I may 
cite this phrase from the letter to Ibsen which 
terminates his volume, ' In truth you will renew 
the miracle of Sophocles — at eighty years of 
age you will give us a new CEdipus.' 

"To-day that which Ehrhard prophesied is 
already three-quarters realized. Since Hedda 
Gabler, Ibsen has given us The Master Builder, 
that heroic drama of pride, and John Gabriel 
Borkman, the secular legend of the human 
chimera." 

Even an indifferent performance which I saw 
at the Schiller Theatre, Berlin, could not quite 
destroy the impression of a wounded Titan 
struggling against fate. John Gabriel Borkman 
is a prodigious figure, a second Mercadet, but 
fashioned by a Balzac of the theatre. 



XVII 

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKE 

DRAMATIC EPILOGUE 

(1899) 

Mr. William Archer sees in this closing drama 
of the social series little else than a resusci- 
tation of the characters and motives that have 
done duty in his earlier plays. It is true that 
there is much familiar music, that the themes 
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HENRIK IBSEN 

nave been treated in the previous works ; never- 
theless the variation is of enthralling interest. 
This epilogue is closely related to The Master 
Builder. Solness the architect is differentiated 
from Arnold Rubek, the sculptor in character ; 
but both men are successful artists ; both men 
have failed in the one achievement worth the 
while — love. As in Brand, Rubek goes to the 
snow-covered heights with his only love — 
Brand's was an ideal ; Rubek's is a woman — 
and the avalanche sweeps both to eternity. 
The Deus caritatis, whose voice thunders in 
the ears of the dying Brand, is in the epilogue 
the voice of the sister of mercy who cries, 
Pax vobiscurn, as Rubek and Irene are whirled 
away. 

Ibsen, always disdainful of stage setttings, 
evidently experienced a change of mind, for, 
following Richard Wagner's example, he makes 
some exceedingly severe demands upon the in- 
genuity of the stage manager, beginning with 
The Lady from the Sea and John Gabriel 
Borkman. 

The story of When We Dead Awake is 
simplicity itself. Arnold Rubek is a famous 
sculptor, in middle years married to Maja, a 
young woman full of the joy of life. The union 
proves unhappy. She is frivolous ; he is failing 
as an artist. Years before he had designed his 
masterwork, The Day of Resurrection, and his 
model was the most beautiful woman in the 
world. The artist conquered the man and he 
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ICONOCLASTS 

allowed Irene to leave him, though she adored 
him. With her departure his fount of inspira- 
tion dried up. He made portrait busts and 
revenged himself on the indifferent world by 
maliciously modelling resemblances to ignoble 
animals in the countenances of his sitters — 
the pig, the goat, the ape, the hawk, were 
faintly suggested. This very modern trait has 
been paralleled in the case of a celebrated 
painter of our times. Henry James, in his own 
faultless way, has told the story in The Liar. 

As is the case with the Ibsen plays, this 
train of happenings leads up to the first act at 
a northern watering-place. Rubek and Maja 
tell each other the truth of their mutual bore- 
dom. Then Irene comes upon the scene, a 
sinister apparition. She is half mad and is 
watched by a sister of mercy. She encounters 
Rubek, and the story of her love, which led to 
insanity, comes out. He sees that his art has 
blinded him to his real happiness. Like Ella 
Rentheim in John Gabriel Borkman, Irene 
accuses him savagely of murdering her love 
life through neglect. Maja has gone off with 
Ulfheim, a savage brute of a hunter, and to- 
gether Rubek and Irene seek to attain the 
heights. But the inexorable law of their being 
bars the way. Only once in a lifetime is it 
vouchsafed to a man or a woman to touch the 
tall stars, and so they perish, but not before 
Rubek has cast off his life lie. 

Eduard Brandes, the brother of the better 
130 



HENRIK IBSEN 

known Georg, himself a critic and dramatist, 
has uttered eloquent words about this drama : — 

Unquestionably, there will be many objections 
made against this magnificent drama because the 
high-sounding prose at times may seem vulnerable 
to the attack of logical analysis. .And it is quite 
certain that the objections will gather themselves 
into the pertinent question, Why did Henrik Ibsen 
show Irene as insane and why does he let Rubek, 
who is not insane, prefer the abnormal woman to the 
beautiful and sensible Maja ? 

To this may be answered, If Ibsen with such 
violence desired to emphasize that life in its entirety, 
even the most artistic, is to be counted as death, 
and that only the life of love is real love, to both 
Irene and Maja, then he was forced to employ the 
most drastic pictures of the kind of death that life 
without love assuredly is. Insanity, without a doubt, 
is both mental and physical death : though the 
insane may exist, yet humanity does not consider 
such existence — life. 

Had not Irene stood there, so heartbroken, so 
ill in mind and evil, so desirous and yet so afraid, 
with the black shadow of cell and restraint in her 
wake, the lesson of the play would not be too plain, 
Without love — no life. 

It is Irene, of course, who is the star character in 
the play. It is far from being the undecisive Rubek 
who not until the hour of his death understood the 
love which Irene offered him, which in Maja's case 
was confined to the customs of conventional mar- 
riage. 

That Henrik Ibsen stands untouched by hij 
131 



ICONOCLASTS 

weight of years, this drama will ere long announce 
to the entire world. It is quite true that the struc- 
ture of the play cannot be analyzed on the spur of 
the moment. The construction embodies a stage 
setting which will enhance the worth of the drama. 
Almost with the identical progress which Irene and 
Rubek make toward the mountain top the acts un- 
fold themselves lucidly and are entirely comprehen- 
sible. The more the psychological problem is 
studied the better will it be understood why Ibsen 
is called great. 

When We Dead Awake is a master's work and a 
masterpiece. Like none other is Ibsen — so grand, 
so mystical, and yet so entirely in agreement with 
the organic make-up of humanity. From the peak 
of the mountain he speaks to us, aged as to years, 
youthful in deed and daring. There is but one ruler, 
says Henrik Ibsen : the great Eros, and the poet is 
his prophet ! 

When We Dead Awake ends the cycle of 
the noble prose dramas of Henrik Ibsen. De- 
spite Mr. Archer's criticism the play shows 
little falling off in intensity, even if the motives 
are thrice familiar. To will greatly is the touch- 
stone of life, to will when you know that you 
are hedged in by overmastering destiny ; to 
dare, though you know that free will is one of 
life's darling illusions — that is success in life. 

To thy own self be true, 

said Shakespeare, and no one has said it with 
such tragic intensity since him as has Henrik 
Ibsen. 

132 



HENRIK IBSEN 

" It has been a veritable misfortune for ^Es- 
thetics that the word ' drama ' has always been 
translated by 'action,' " wrote Nietzsche. "Wag- 
ner is not the only one who errs here ; all the 
world is still in error about the matter; even 
the philologists ought to know better. The 
ancient drama had grand pathetic scenes in 
view ; it first excluded action (relegated it pre- 
vious to the commencement, or behind the 
scene). The word 'drama' is of Doric origin, 
and according to Dorian usage signifies ' event,' 
* history,' both words in a hieratic sense. The 
oldest drama represented local legend, the ' sa- 
cred history,' on which the establishment of the 
cult rested (consequently no doing but a hap- 
pening . . .)." 

And elsewhere Nietzsche declares : " The affir- 
mation of life, even in its most unfamiliar and 
most severe problems, the will to live life, enjoy- 
ing its own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice of its 
highest types — that is what I call Dionysian, that 
is what I divined as the bridge to a psychology of 
the tragic poet. Not in order to get rid of terror 
and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion 
by its vehement discharge (it was thus that 
Aristotle understood it), but beyond terror and 
pity, to realize in fact the eternal delight of be- 
coming — that delight which even involves in 
itself the joy of annihilation." 

He also pictures the great tragic artist offer 
ing a draught of sweetest cruelty to heroic men. 
Readers interested should study Lessing in his 
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ICONOCLASTS 

Hamburg Dramaturgy, Schopenhauer's essay 
on Tragedy, and Nietzsche's valuable contribu- 
tion to the discussion, his early work, The Birth 
of Tragedy. The latter extols the Dionysian 
spirit of the drama — its ecstasy and its trium- 
phant affirmation of life the eternal. Walter 
Pater should be consulted on the same lofty 
theme. 

In form the perfected Ibsen tragedy follows 
Sophocles : anterior to the rising of the curtain 
the various motives have developed and collided 
in the dark chamber of the dramatist's brain. 
They are then incarnated for the spectator as 
they near their catastrophe ; thus the most rigid 
economy of effects is practised, the three unities 
preached by Boileau are set before us with 
unerring logic. It is all in a single picture, this 
denouement of his character's silent years. The 
method has its drawbacks, yet there is no deny 
ing its intensity, which like the fiery garment 
of Nessus envelops the dramatist's unhappy 
men and women. Determinate as is the motiva- 
tion of these dramas, there is allowed the inter- 
val for action that might be described by the 
tick of the pendulum, — diastole, systole, ebb, 
and flow. But within that tiny mental territory 
man is monarch of his acts ; moreover, as Ernest 
Renan suggests, " What we call infinite time is, 
perhaps, a minute between two miracles." Man 
dances on the rope of the present between the 
past and the future, says Nietzsche ; the spec- 
tacle, brief as it is, has been recorded by Ibsea 
134 



HENRIK IBSEN 

Renan, who anticipated Nietzsche by his procla- 
mation that man should be virtuous for virtue's 
sake alone, without regard for rewards attendant 
upon its performance, has also written in his 
preface to Caliban (1878): — 

" Man sees clearly at the hour which is strik- 
ing that he will never know anything of the 
supreme cause of the universe, or of his own 
destiny. Nevertheless he wishes to be talked 
to about all that." And Ibsen has talked to us 
much about all these things, following Goethe's 
axiom that "no real circumstance is unpoetic 
so long as the poet knows how to use it." 
The theatre director in Faust remarks, " He 
who brings much, brings something to every 
one." 

Octave Uzanne wrote, " People the orchestra 
and galleries of a theatre with a thousand Renans 
and a thousand Herbert Spencers, and the com- 
bination of these two thousand brains of genius 
will not produce aught but the soul of a con- 
cierge." 

So much for the power of collectivity. This 
theme which Gustave Le Bon has treated in 
The Mob and The Psychology of the Peoples 
— literally a drag-net psychology — may be 
found lucidly discussed in Mr. A. B. Walkley's 
Dramatic Criticism. The modern audience, 
he says, is no longer a great baby, like the 
mediaeval one, but an intelligent adult. " On 
this crowd depends our future hopes of the 
stage." 

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ICONOCLASTS 

With all the authorities, apologists, and pane 
gyrists, Ibsen remains a difficult nut to crack. 
His perversities of execution, aberrations in sen- 
timent, contrarieties, and monumental obstinacy 
are too much for the average commentator's 
nerves — why, then, should he be enjoyed by the 
public when doctors of the drama disagree ? 
His warmest admirers deny him the gift of 
humour, but we believe that he is the greatest 
humorist, as well as dramatist, of the nine- 
teenth century. No man, not even Browning, 
has kept such rigid features in the very face of 
idiotic abuse and still more silly praise. Not a 
sense of humour ! After A Doll's House came 
Ghosts, totally contravening the thesis, or sup- 
posed thesis, of that problem play ; after Ghosts, 
An Enemy of the People, which declared for the 
rights of the individual ; after this piece the mad- 
dening and angular ironies of The Wild Duck, 
in which he mocks himself, his theories; and 
then as if to explode the whole Ibsen mine, 
Rosmersholm appeared. Therein the reformer, 
whether idealist or of the ordinary peddling 
political stripe, is mercilessly flayed, and Re- 
bekka West, his wonderful incarnation of 
passion, deceits, femininity, and renunciation, 
sacrifices her life to a false ideal, to " Rosmers- 
holm ideals," and mocks herself as she joins 
in the double suicide. No humour ! What, 
then, of Hedda Gabler, the young woman of 
to-day ; shallow-cultured, her religious under- 
pinning gone, vacillating, cerebral, all nerves 
136 



HENRIK IBSEN 

full of a Bashkirtseff-like charm, this Hedda 
who is so modern, who peeps over moral preci- 
pices, shudders and peeps again — what precon- 
ceived theories of Ibsen did Hedda not upset ? 

Followed the fantastic Master Builder, Little 
Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We 
Dead Awake, each mutually destructive of what 
we supposed Ibsen stood for, destructive of the 
fumbling decadent that spite depicts him. Not 
a humorist! Why, Aristophanes, Jonathan 
Swift, Dumas fils> and Calvin (who was fond of 
roasting his religious foes) rolled into one is 
about the happiest formula we can express for 
the tense-lipped old humorist of Norway ! 

Like the John Henry Newman of Apologia 
Pro Vita Sua, his chief concern is with the soul. 
To call him hard names is to betray the inner 
anxieties that assail us at some time of our ex- 
istence. "What if this man were telling the 
truth ? " we shiveringly ask. Then we incon- 
tinently proceed to stone him to death with 
scabrous adjectives ! 

Ibsen never condescended to newspaper po- 
lemics — usually the refuge of second-rate men. 
And his scorn and cruelty are but a disguised 
kindness ; if he lays bare our rickety social sys- 
tems, our buckram politics, exposes the falsetto 
of our ideals, the flabbiness of our culture, the 
cowardice of our ethics, the sleek optimism of 
our public counsellors, and the dry rot of love- 
less marriage, it is to blazon our moral maladies 
that we may seek their cur^. 
137 



ICONOCLASTS 

Like John Knox with Mary Stuart, he rudely 
raps at the door of our hearts, bidding us awaken 
and open them. He is a voice crying in the 
wilderness of shams — shams social, the shams 
of sentiment, of money-getting. And he some- 
times fails to discriminate the sheep and goats, 
tweaking the foolish, self-satisfied noses of the 
former so sadly, that he has been accused of 
mixing his moral values. But like Tennyson 
he knows that there is often honest faith in 
doubt. His words and works may be compared 
to that serpent of brass erected by Moses in the 
midst of his ailing nation, which was at once a 
symbol and a prophylactic. 

Ibsen, the cunning contriver of sinewy, vital 
dramas, swift in action, with all extraneous flesh 
lopped away like the muscular figure of a Greek 
athlete, this Ibsen of overarching poetic power, 
is a man disdainful of our praise or our blame, 
knowing, with the subtle prevision of genius, 
that one day the world will go to him for the 
consolations of his austere art. 



m 



II 

AUGUST STRINDBERG 

To search for God and to find the Devil ! that is what 
happened to me. — Strindberg's Inferno. 

A critic is a man who expects miracles. So 
it has become the general practice to ignore 
a poet in his totality and seek only for isolated 
traits. And then the trouble we take to search 
for what a man is not : the lack of humour in 
Shelley, the lack of spirituality in Byron, the 
lack of sanity in Nietzsche, the lack of melody 
in Richard Strauss ! The case of Johann 
August Strindberg has also proved tempting to 
critical head-hunters. Long before we read his 
books we knew of his neurasthenia, and after 
his reputation as a many-sided man of genius 
had been established in Europe his matrimonial 
affairs were employed as an Exhibit A to divorce 
him from public and critical favour. And yet 
this poet, romancer, and novelist, who has 
created such a profusion of types as to be called 
" The Shakespeare of Sweden," this more than 
countryman of Swedenborg in his powers of 
intense vision, this seer and chemist, possesses 
such a robust, tangible personality that the world 
139 



ICONOCLASTS 

is hardly to be censured for being curious about 
the man before studying his works. 

His stock stems from the very soil of Sweden. 
In the seventeenth century his ancestors were 
living in the little village of Strinne. Tremen- 
dous in physique and intermingled with clerical 
strains, Strindberg inherits both his big frame 
and sensitive conscience from his mixed fore- 
bears. His is the sanguine scepticism like that 
of Renan, Anatole France, Barres, Bernard 
Shaw, as Rene Schickele has suggested. A 
simple pagan he is not ; nor would his particular 
case have been so complicated. His lyric pes- 
simism and his gift of distilling his bitter experi- 
ences into a tale or a play are to-day merged 
in the broad currents of his historical dramas 
and socialistic novels. Even his misogyny has 
become ameliorated, — those episodes in which 
are crystallized the petty misery of a married 
couple, — unpaid debts, unloved children, the 
bailiff knocking at the back door! — let us 
believe that they, too, were but a phase of his 
development. Played in Germany and France, — 
Zola hailed his play, Married, as remarkable, 
and its author as a conf?-£re, — popular in 
Russia, recognized though not without many 
years of unjust probation, Strindberg may be 
said to have achieved what he set out to do, — 
" to search for God and find the devil," and once 
more to find his God. 

Herr Emil Schering, the devoted German 
translator of Strindberg, related to me this aneo 
140 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 

dote. On the writing-desk of Ibsen there stands, 
or stood, a photograph of Strindberg the Swede, 
once Ibsen's foe. To a visitor's surprise, Ibsen, 
after gazing in silence for some time at the 
picture, said, " There is one who will be greater 
than I." 

Whether this story be true or not Strindberg 
is a man of genius, a crazy one at times, fascinat- 
ing as a writer and interesting as a psychiatric 
study. And he answers to the chief test of the 
dramatist — he is a prime creator of character. 
Edmund Gosse pronounced him to be " certainly 
the most remarkable creative talent started by 
the philosophy of Nietzsche " ; and in speaking 
of his novel, Inferno, he says that it " is a record 
of wretchedness and superstition and squalor, 
told by a maniac who is a positive Lucifer of the 
intellect. ... in France not only has he a 
large following, but he exercises a positive in- 
fluence." Yet this erratic man has planned 
technical revolutions for the dramatic stage — on 
the mechanical as well as the spiritual side — that 
are as startling as were Richard Wagner's in the 
music drama. It is not necessary here to de- 
scribe his scheme for presenting his long his- 
torical dramas without a change of front scene. 

Strindberg is a man with an abnormal emo- 
tional temperament which he has often allowed 
to master his judgment. If he had been a com- 
poser, while his symphonies would have un- 
doubtedly provoked abuse, they would not have 
scandalized moralists — such is the peculiar 
141 



ICONOCLASTS 

vagueness of that art in the domain of articu 
late thought. Some day the tone-symbols ol 
music will become a part of our consciousness, 
and then we may confidently expect arrests, 
prosecutions, transportations, perhaps execu- 
tionSc Luckily for the bold and imaginative 
thinkers, music remains the only art, the last 
sanctuary wherein originality may reveal itself 
in the face of fools and not pierce their mental 
opacity. 

August Strindberg is a name little known to 
the English stage or reading public. Yet his 
dramatic work dates back to 1872, when 
Meister Olaf was composed. In this youthful 
essay he anticipated by seven years the Nora 
type presented by Ibsen. His first novel ap- 
peared in 1879, and in 1884, when Giftas was 
published, the stories in this violent book nearly 
sent him to the Stockholm jail. It was 1888 be- 
fore Grafin Julie was put forth, and this play 
originally in three acts brought Strindberg Euro- 
pean fame. Glaubiger, in 1889, confirmed the 
first critical impression that a writer and thinker 
of a high order was come. Strindberg's career 
has been a disordered one. Poverty interrupted 
his studies at the Upsala University, made him 
a "super "in a theatre, and drove him to jour- 
nalism, and to become a doctor's assistant. Al- 
ways unhappy in his relation with women, often 
quite mad, and usually living on the treacherous 
borderland of hallucination, his existence has 
been fevered and miserable, though his successes 
142 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 

are brilliant. Sanity has not been his cardinal 
quality — he has more than once gone to the 
asylum, emerging in a few months cured, and, 
remarkable as it sounds, remembering the de- 
tails of his mania. Detraqui, sick and cracked, 
he nevertheless plunged into the study of 
chemistry, searching for a universal solvent — a 
mad dream that would interest Balzac. Ideas 
almost consumed the brain of this ctrtbraL 

But hard work calmed his nerves, as was the 
case with Dostoievsky. Strindberg's scientific 
investigations are full of the flashes of divination 
that at times lend value to the theories of imagi- 
native men. He has written an Introduction a 
une Chimie unitaire, which was favourably re- 
ceived. It was a conclusion foregone that his 
impulsive and overwrought emotional nature 
would lead him into extravagances. Inferno 
and the double drama, Nach Damaskus, re- 
veal his eroticism, his exasperated imagination, 
his harsh atheism. He has confessed in one of 
his autobiographical outpourings — for he lays 
bare his soul with the same naivete as did Tolstoy 
and Rousseau — that in his youth he was a be- 
liever, that the modulation to free-thinking and 
rank atheism was an easy one. Then, after a 
period of turbulence, he became the dispassionate 
ponderer; and finally socialism, with its remote 
horizons, its heroisms, its substitution of human- 
ity for the old gods, caught his wandering soul. 

He lives no longer in Paris, a whirlpool for a 
man of his nature, and since his third marriage, 
H3 



ICONOCLASTS 

to Harriet Bosse, the popular Swedish actress, 
called by her admirers the " Scandinavian 
Duse," he has resided in Stockholm. There 
his great historical plays have been heard and 
praised and abused; there he shows in his 
later writings a mystic strain ; there last autumn 
after some years of exaltation he agreed to sep- 
arate from his wife, for the clash of two such 
opposing temperaments " hindered their free 
development"- — so says his faithful biographer. 
The separation caused much commotion in artis- 
tic and dramatic circles. It was, however, a 
perfectly amicable one ; Harriet Bosse declared 
that she needed more liberty, for she hopes to 
travel throughout Europe. A laudable ambition. 
Strindberg, notwithstanding his unhappy unions, 
is a staunch monogamist, and allowed the woman 
to go her way. He has already drawn her por- 
trait in the powerful historical play Christine. 
Therein the soul of the actress is set before us 
as the counterfeit Queen of Sweden ; winning 
and masculine, flattering and harsh, a heartless 
demon and a tender maiden begging for sym- 
pathy ; anon a mocking tyrant, a wild cat, a 
second Messalina. It would appear that the 
poet lost no time in studying Fru Strindberg's 
characteristics. She, on her side, had made a 
contract with her manager not to appear in any 
of her husband's plays, though she has enjoyed 
triumphs in Fraulein Julie and Samum. Per- 
haps this was the first little rift in the domestic 
lute. 

144 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 

Biologists believe that after forty a man of 
genius — who is in Darwinian parlance a sport 
— returns to his tribe; resumes in himself 
the traits of his parents. Perhaps Strindberg 
has reached the grand climacteric and may give 
us less disturbing masterpieces. In 1902, under 
the title of Elf Einakter, a German translation 
of eleven of his one-act plays was published. 
This collection contains the ripest offering thus 
far of his unquestionable genius. It begins 
with Grafin Julie, condensed by the dramatist into 
a one-act piece. " A tragedy of naturalism," 
he calls it. It is an emotional bombshell. The 
social world seems topsy-turvied after a first read- 
ing. After a second, while the gripping power 
does not relax, one realizes the writer's deep, 
almost abysmal knowledge of human nature. Im- 
agine a Joseph Andrews made love to by a Lady 
Booby, youthful, fascinating. But Fielding aims 
light shafts of satire ; Strindberg calls up ghosts 
with haunting eyes. Passion there is, and a 
horrible atmosphere of reality. You know the 
affair has happened; you see the valet, Jean, 
chucking his cook-sweetheart under the chin as 
she feeds him with dainties in the kitchen ; you 
witness the appearance on the scene of Julie 
enamoured ; frantic, unhappy Julie ; and you 
view the crumbling of her soul, depicted as in 
one of those drawings of Giulio Romano from 
which you avert your head. The finale makes 
Ghosts an entertainment for urchins. 

Everything is brought about naturally, inevi- 
145 



ICONOCLASTS 

tably. Be it understood, Strindberg is never 
pornographic, nor does he show a naked soul 
merely to afford charming diversion, which is 
the practice of some French dramatists. 

What would our Ibsen-hating critics say after 
Grafin Julie or Glaubiger ! That kitchen — 
fancy a kitchen as a battlefield of souls ! — with 
its good-hearted and pious cook, the impudent 
scoundrel of a valet eager for revenge on his 
superiors, and the hallucinated girl from above 
stairs — it is a tiny epic of hatred, of class against 
mass. 

Julie is neurotic. She has coolly snapped the 
betrothal vows made with a titled young man of 
the district. It is St. John's Eve. The villa of 
the Count, Julie's father, is empty save for the 
two servants, Jean and Christina — the latter is 
the cook. Julie, bored by her colourless life and 
fevered by a midsummer's madness, throws her- 
self at the valet's head. He is frightened. His 
servant nature has the upper hand until the pair, 
forced to hide because of the intrusion of rough 
country folk, reappear. Then the male brute is 
smirking, triumphant. Justin Huntly McCarthy 
made a translation of the piece for an English 
magazine in 1892. Here is an excerpt: — 

[Julie enters, sees the disorder in the kitchen, and clasps 
her hands. Then she takes a powder puff and pow- 
ders her /ace.] 
Jean. [Enters excited] There, you see and you 

hear. Do you still think it possible to remain here ? 
Julie. No, I do not. But what shall we do ? 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 

Jean. Fly ; travel ; fly away from here. 

Julie. Travel ? Yes ! But where ? 

Jean. To Switzerland, to the Italian lakes. Have 
you ever been there ? 

Julie. No. Is it beautiful ? 

Jean. An eternal summer. Orange trees, laurels 
— ahl 

Julie. But what shall we do there afterwards ? 

Jean. We will start a first-class hotel for first-class 
guests. 

Julie. A hotel ! 

Jean. That is the life to live, believe me. Always 
new faces, new languages, not a moment's leisure for 
worrying or dreaming, no seeking after employment, 
for work comes of itself. Night and day the bell 
rings, the trains whistle, the omnibuses come and 
go while the gold pieces roll into the till. That is a 
life to live. 

Julie. That is a life to live. And what of me ? 

Jean. You shall be the mistress of the house, the 
ornament of the firm. With your appearance and 
your manners we are sure of a colossal success. You 
sit like a queen in the office and set your slaves in 
motion with one touch on the electric bell ; the 
guests march past your throne and lay their treas- 
ures humbly on the table. You cannot imagine how 
people tremble when they get a bill. I will salt the 
accounts and you will sugar them with your most 
bewitching smile. Yes, let us travel far from here. 
\He takes a time-table from his pocket '.] Good. By 
the next train we are in Malmo at 6.30, in Hamburg 
at 8.40 to-morrow morning, from Frankfort to Basle 
in one day, and we are in Como by the St. Gothard 
route in, let me see, three days. Three days I 

147 



ICONOCLASTS 

Julie. That is all very fine. But, Jean, you must 
give me courage. Say that you love me. Come and 
take me in your arms. 

Jean. [Hesitating] I would like to, but I dare 
not. Not here in this house. I love you without 
doubt. Can you doubt it ? 

Julie. You ! Say " thou " to me. Between us 
there are no longer any barriers. Say " thou." 

Jean. [Troubled] I cannot. There are still bar- 
riers between us so long as we remain in this house. 
It recalls the past, it recalls the Count. I have 
never met any man who compelled such respect from 
me. I have only to see his glove lying on a table 
to feel quite small. I have only to hear his bell and 
I start like a shying horse. And when I look at his 
boots standing there so stiff and stately, it makes me 
shiver. [He pushes the boots away with his foot.~\ 
Superstition, prejudice, which has been driven into 
us from childhood, but which we can never get free 
of. If you will only come into another country, into 
a republic, then people shall kneel down before my 
porter's livery, people shall kneel down. But I shall 
not kneel down. I am not born to kneel, for there 
is stuff in me ; there is character in me ; and if once 
I reach the lowest branch, you shall watch me climb. 
To-day I am a lackey, but next year I am a pro- 
prietor ; in a few years I shall have an income, and 
then I run off to Roumania, where I buy a decora- 
tion. I can — mark well that I say can — die a 
count. 

Julie. Beautiful, beautiful ! 

Jean. Ah, in Roumania a man can buy a count's 
title, and then you will be a countess, my countess. 

Julie. What do I care for what I have cast 

148 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 

aside ! Say that you love me, or else — ah, what am 
I else? 

Jean. I will say it a thousand times — later on. 
But not here. And above all, no hysterics, or all is 
lost. We must manage the affair quietly, like sensi- 
ble people. [He takes out a cigar, cuts the end, and 
lights it.] Sit down there, and I will sit here, and 
then we can chat as if nothing had happened. 

Julie. Oh, my God ! Have you no feelings ? 

Jean. I ! why, there is no one more sensitive than 
I, but I can command my feelings. 

Julie. A short time ago you would have kissed 
my shoe, and now — 

Jean. \Coldly\ Yes, before. But now we have 
something else to think about. 

The scamp sounds her as to the money she 
possesses. She has none. He compels her to 
rob her father. He kills her bird. She curses 
him, for her poor brain is going under from 
the strain put upon it. She throws herself upon 
the mercy of the cook; but Christina, who is 
a good woman, repels and rebukes the sinner. 
The Count returns. He rings. Jean again 
becomes the servant, though not until he has 
given Julie his razor, bidding her use it. She 
goes out and kills herself, unable to resist the 
stronger will. 

In this shocking drama is crystallized all the 
bitterness of Strindberg, for he once married 
a Countess; he, too, has lived in the Inferno. 
Again we say the ending revolts; in com- 
parison, the coda of Ibsen's Ghosts is a mild 
149 



ICONOCLASTS 

exercise in emotional arpeggios. Strindberg's 
heavy fist smashes out music, sinister and mur- 
derous, in this ruthless play. 

Julie is a close study of a girl whose blood is 
tainted before birth, whose education has been 
false, whose life in society has inflamed her pas- 
sions. She falls easily when the cunning Jean 
tempts her at the psychologic moment. I saw 
Julie at the Kleines Theatre, Berlin, last autumn, 
Frau Eysoldt — Sorma suffering from a bruised 
arm — - assuming the title role, deciphering 
with skill the abnormal hieroglyphics of the 
character. 

In Glaubiger, a tragic comedy, Strindberg 
treats, with his accustomed omniscience, a sweet 
little story about a man who follows his runaway 
wife to a seaside resort and becomes acquainted 
with the new husband — unknown to the lady, 
who is away for a week. Here we catch a 
glimpse of another hell, the cruelty of a power- 
ful intellect. The weaker man is a painter, 
turned sculptor, and — subtle irony — he models 
only his wife's figure. (This was published in 
1889; Ibsen certainly read it — witness When 
We Dead Awake.) The snaring of the poor 
emotional wretch's soul is masterly. It is all 
over in an hour, the entire play, and again we 
feel as if we had mutely assisted at the obsequies 
of three human beings. 

The first husband — who is discovered as such 
at the end of the play — meets his former wife, 
and her infamous nature is exposed. The artist 
150 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 

hears the conversation, and his fate is not to be 
spoken of lightly. We pass on. 

Paria is after a tale of Ola Hansson. It need 
not detain us. Poe is a child compared to 
Strindberg in the analysis of morbid states of 
soul. Samum is a shuddering ode to revenge. 
Finally we arrive at Die Starkere, which met 
with such acclaim on the Continent. Its chief 
device of having one silent figure and making 
the other do the talking is sufficiently novel. 
But it is again the drama, always the drama with 
Strindberg. His picture, executed by a kindred 
and sympathetic interpreter, Edvard Munch, 
shows the face of one who, like Dante, has seen 
the nethermost hell. 

Played by two artistic actresses, this sardonic 
little sketch, replete with irony, malice, hatred, — 
yet full of humanity, — would prove most attrac- 
tive. It has many sly strokes of humour. The 
scene of the action is a cafe on Christmas Eve. 
Madame X talks to Mademoiselle Y, who re- 
mains absolutely silent, yet by glances and ges- 
tures contrives to send the other woman scudding 
along the road from idle, amenable chatter to out- 
rageous recrimination. The two women love 
the same man. Madame X is his wife. Fe- 
rociously she exposes her secrets. Her husband 
at first has forced her to imitate Mademoiselle Y. 
But she is now the stronger. She has made him 
forget his early love, who sits in a dreary cafe 
alone on Christmas Eve, while she, his legal wife, 
will go home to the father and children ! It is 
151 
•3 »i* **% 



ICONOCLASTS 

an ugly episode. In Das Band we reach a play 
revealing the better characteristics of the poet. 
It consists only of a court-room scene with jury- 
men, judge, and officers before whom a husband 
and wife make their petition for divorce — ac- 
cording to Scandinavian procedure. They are 
resolved to separate ; but there is a child, a son, 
beloved by both. With this elemental stuff as a 
subject, Strindberg wrings the heart of you. At 
the end the parents damn themselves by their 
own admission, the child is taken from their 
custody, and they confront each other in the 
deserted, dim court room, their hearts bursting, 
their future a foggy, abandoned field. They re- 
call the poet Aldrich's picture of No-man's land, 
where the soul sees its double, a doppelgdnger. 

"And who are you ?" cried one agape, 
Shuddering in the gloaming light ; 

" I know not, 11 said the second shape, 
"I only died last night. 1 ' 

These two souls in the play, once hooked by 
the steels of marriage and parenthood, realize as 
they fall loathingly asunder that they are dead, 
that their life has passed on into the soul of their 
miserable boy. It is such a play as this that 
vindicates Strindberg's claim to the mastery of 
the drama. Here he is at his human best, freed 
from the bizarre, and his humour and wit illumi- 
nate the ghastly darkness with friendly flashes. 
The jurymen are excellent, and more comical 
still are the court officers. Many touches 
throughout would make the translation and per* 
152 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 

formance of Das Band profitable. And not once 
is the child on the stage. Possibly, as America 
is a divorce-loving nation, it would reject with 
indignation the sight of so many bleaching family 
bones ! 

Mit dem Feuer Spielen is a comedy of a drastic 
kind. It shows Nietzsche's influence. The sis- 
ter of Nietzsche, Frau Forster-Nietzsche, once 
assured me in Weimar that her brother enjoyed 
reading Strindberg's novels. And there are 
several references to Strindberg in the pub- 
lished correspondence of Georg Brandes and 
Nietzsche. 

Debit and Credit also proves that, consciously 
or unconsciously, Strindberg is a Nietzschean. 
It is a rogue's comedy with original variations. 
The chief character evokes laughter, for through 
the grim and sordid rifts in the plot — it pictures 
a tawdry great man — we hear bursts of natural 
fun. There is humour, kindly and mocking. Very 
Shaw-like, except that it was written in 1892, is 
Mutterliebe. In Mrs. Warren's Profession, Mr. 
Shaw expanded the same grewsome idea. Else- 
where the Irish writer calls Strindberg " the only 
living genuine Shakespearian dramatist." Strind- 
berg in his fifteen pages traverses a lifetime, 
and his ending is logical. 

In the preface to Fraulein Julie, Strindberg 
makes a general confession — for him as for 
Tolstoy a psychologic necessity. " Some peo- 
ple," he says, "have accused my tragedy of being 
too sad, as though one desired a merry tragedy. 
153 



ICONOCLASTS 

People call authoritatively for the Joy of Life, 
and theatrical managers call for farces, as though 
the Joy of Life consisted in being foolish, and 
in describing people who each and every one 
are suffering from St. Vitus's dance or idiocy. 
I find the joy of life in the powerful, terrible 
struggle of life ; and the capability of experi- 
encing something, of learning something, is a 
pleasure to me. And therefore I have chosen 
an unusual but instructive subject; in other 
words, an exception, but a great exception, that 
will strengthen the rules which offend the apos- 
tles of the commonplace. What will further 
create antipathy in some is the fact that my 
plan of action is not simple, and that there is 
not one view alone to be taken of it. An event 
in life — and this is rather a new discovery — is 
usually accompanied by a series of more or less 
deep-seated motives ; but the spectator usually 
generally chooses that one which his power 
of judgment finds simplest to grasp, or that his 
gift of judgment considers the most honourable. 
For example, some one commits suicide : ' Bad 
business ! ' says the citizen ; ' Unhappy love ! ' 
says the woman ; ' Sickness ! ' the sick man ; 
' Disappointed hopes ! ' the bankrupt. But it 
may be that none of these reasons is the real 
one, and that the dead man hid the real one by 
pretending another that would throw the most 
favourable light on his memory." 

The Father (produced in 1887 and translated 
into English by N. Erichsen) is in three short 
154 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 

acts. It depicts the destruction of a man's 
brain through the machinations of his malevo- 
lent wife. Strindberg's misogyny is the key- 
note of his early work. He hates woman. He 
accuses Ibsen of gynolatry. " My superior 
intelligence revolts," he cries, " against the 
gynolatry which is the latest superstition of 
the free-thinkers." His own married life was 
so unhappy that he revenges himself by attack- 
ing the entire sex. Every book, every play, is 
a confession. He is the most subjective drama- 
tist and poet of his age. In Comrades he 
synthesizes the situation : — 

To wish to dethrone Man and replace him by 
Woman — going back to a matriarchy — to dethrone 
the true master of creation, he who has created 
civilization and given to the vulgar the benefit of his 
culture ; he who is the generator of great thoughts, 
of the arts and crafts, of everything, indeed ; to de- 
throne him, I say, in order to elevate "les sales 
betes " of women, who have never taken part in the 
work of civilization (with a few futile exceptions), is 
to my mind a provocation to my sex. And at the 
•idea of seeing " arrive " these anthropomorphs, these 
half apes, this horde of half-developed animals, these 
women whose intellects are of the age of bronze, the 
male in me revolts. I feel myself stirred by an 
angry need of resisting this enemy, inferior in intel- 
lect, but superior by her complete absence of moral 
sense. 

In this war to the death between the two sexes 
it would appear that the less honest and more per- 
verse would come out conqueror, since the chance 

i«J5 



ICONOCLASTS 

of man's gaining the battle is very dubious, handi- 
capped as he is by an inbred respect for woman, 
without counting the advantages that he gives her 
in supporting her and leaving her time free to equip 
herself for the fight. 

This sex-against-sex manifesto will not make 
him popular in America, a land peopled with 
gynolatrists ; but his plays and novels may be 
read with profit ; if nothing else, they illustrate 
the violent rebound of the pendulum in Scandi- 
navia, where the woman question absorbed all 
others for a time. Besides, Strindberg is a good 
hater, and good haters are rare and stimulating 
spectacles. 

Inferno is the very quintessence of Strind- 
berg. Written between two attacks — his un- 
stable nerves send him at intervals into retreat 
— it is the most awful portrayal of mental 
suffering ever committed to paper. Poe said in 
one of his Marginalia that the man who dared 
to write the story of his heart would fire the 
paper upon which he wrote. This Strindberg 
has dared to do with a freedom, a diabolical 
minuteness, that make the nai've stutterings of 
Verlaine and the sophisticated confessions of 
Huysmans mere literature. Because of their 
intensity you are forced to believe Strindberg, 
though his is only too plainly a pathologic case ; 
the delusions of persecution, of grandeur, of 
almost the entire lyre of psychiatric woes, are 
to be detected in this unique book. An enemy, 
a Russian, haunts him in Paris and plays on the 

i 5 6 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 

piano poisonous music which warns the listener 
that he is doomed. It is the history of Strind- 
berg's quarrel with the Polish poet mystic and 
dramatist, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who really 
tracked the Swede because he was jealous of 
his own wife. Strindberg once wrote of Maupas- 
sant's La Horla, " I recognize myself in that, 
and do not deny that insanity has developed." fc 

Margit is a five-act drama, with the sub-title 
La Femme du Chevalier Bengt. It is a his- 
torical play of the times of the Reformation, 
and it is modern in its glacial analysis of the 
feminine soul. The picture is more various than 
is the case with the eternal monologue or dia- 
logues of his shorter pieces — and there is humour 
of a deadly kind. In Das Geheimnis der Gilde 
(1879-80) the theme of Ibsen's The Master 
Builder was anticipated. To enumerate the 
works of Strindberg would consume columns ; 
Herr Schering of Berlin has literally devoted 
his life to the task of translating them. Al- 
ready there are forty volumes of plays, tales, 
novels, essays, monographs, poems, fables. Even 
in these times of piping versatility, the many- 
sided activities of the Swede amaze. His Nach 
Damaskus reveals a tendency to drift Rome- 
ward, to that Roman church, the sanctuary for . 
souls weary of the conflict. There is no deny- 
ing the fact that Strindberg's later productions 
show a cooler head, steadier nerves, though the 
motives are usually madness or blood guilt. The 
latest volume at the time of writing is devoted 
iS7 



ICONOCLASTS 

to three plays, — Die Kronbraut, Schwanenweiss, 
Ein Traumspiel. Two of these are powerful 
and painful. The playwright paints the peas- 
antry of his country with the sombre brush of 
Hauptmann, Ein Traumspiel is that wonderful 
thing, a real dream put before us with all the 
wild irrelevancies of a dream, yet with sober and 
convincing art. As a stage piece it would be 
superbly fantastic. Strindberg has a faculty, 
which he shares in common with E. T. W. Hoff- 
mann and Edgar Poe, of catching the ghosts of 
his brain at their wildest and pinning them down 
on paper. In such moods he may be truly called 
a seer. Swedenborg alone equals him in the 
veracity and intensity of his visions. 

These later plays were admittedly composed 
during the few happy years with his third wife, Fru 
Strindberg-Bosse. Edwin Bjorkman, who has 
written with authority of his fellow-countryman, 
declares that " the motives that move Strindberg 
are moral." 

"One of his favourite doctrines," continues 
Mr. Bjorkman, "is that social and individual 
purity is the only solid foundation for physical 
and mental health, as well as an indispensable 
condition of true achievement. He speaks some- 
where of an artist 'who was yearning for the 
summit of ambition without being willing to pay 
the price required of those who are to reach it.' " 
And then he adds, "The only choice left us by 
life is between the laurel and our pleasure." 

Further he quotes the dramatist, "I let my- 

7 IS 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 

self be carried away by the heat of the battle 
[over the woman's emancipation movement, of 
which he was at that time the only prominent 
literary antagonist in the Scandinavian coun- 
tries], and I went so far beyond the limits of 
propriety that my countrymen feared I had be- 
come insane." 

An alchemist, a dabbler in spiritualism, a 
wanderer among the lowly long before Gorky 
was heard of, Strindberg once wrote to a friend 
when lack of money kept him a practical pris- 
oner on a small island outside of Stockholm, 
although his writing-desk was housing the com- 
pleted manuscripts of six one-act plays and two 
larger dramas, " I am thinking of becoming a 
photographer in order to save my talent as a 
writer." 

A later novel is autobiographic. Einsam 
was published in 1903. It is more reflective 
than his other books and betrays the loneliness 
of the returned exile. It registers the poet's 
dissatisfaction with Lund, to which he went after 
the tremendous experiences from 1894 to 1898. 
A most startling play, one of my favourites, is 
Totentauz. It is a double drama, the shabby 
hero of which would have pleased the creator 
of Captain Costigan. His novel Die Gotischen 
Zimmer (1904) is of socialistic character and 
contains many eloquent pages. As he was born 
January 22, 1849, in Stockholm, it will be seen 
that this erratic man is beginning to reach the 
cooling period of his genius. 
'59 



ICONOCLASTS 

The most vivid of his books, after Inferno, is 
The Confessions of a Fool (Die Beichte eines 
Thoren). Strindberg's wife, to marry him, had 
divorced herself from a baron. Yet the sus- 
picious writer accused her of all the crimes in 
the calendar. And he also admits that he 
abused her. Strindberg was suffering from 
paranoia simplex chronica, according to Dr. 
William Hirsch, whose valuable work, Genius 
and Degeneration, contains a study of the 
Swede's case. What is of peculiar interest is 
the symptom in his malady called " referential 
ideas." " The patients," says Dr. Hirsch, " re- 
fer all that goes on about to themselves. They 
suspect that the world is leagued against them." 
For example : when Strindberg first read Ib- 
sen's Wild Duck, he immediately thought the 
whole piece was intended for him and was only 
written on his account. He expressed himself 
as follows : — 

It was a drama of the famous Norwegian spy, 
the inventor of the equality madness. How the 
book fell into my hands I could not say. But now 
everything was clear and gave occasion to the worst 
suspicions concerning the reputation of my wife. 
The plot of the drama was as follows : A photogra- 
pher (a nickname I had earned by my novels drawn 
from real life) has married a person of doubtful 
repute, who had been formerly the mistress of a 
great proprietor. The woman supports the hus- 
band from a secret fund which she derives from her 
former partner. In addition, she carries on the 
1 60 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 

business of her husband, a good-for-nothing, who 
spends his time drinking in the society of persons 
of no consequence. Now that is a misrepresenta- 
tion of the facts committed by the reporters. They 
were informed that Maria [Strindberg's wife] made 
translations, but they did not know that it was I who 
particularly corrected them and paid over to her the 
sums received for them. Matters become bad when 
the poor photographer discovers that the adored 
daughter is not his child, and that the wife warned 
him when she induced him to marry her. To com- 
plete his disgrace, the husband consents to accept 
a large sum as indemnity. By this I understand 
Maria's loan upon the baron's security, which I 
endorsed after my wedding. ... I prepared a 
great scene for the afternoon. I wished to catch 
Maria in cross-examination, to which I wished to 
give the form of a defence for us both. We had 
been equally attracted by the scarecrow of the 
masculinists, who had been paid for the pretty job. 

To show how mad were his conclusions it is 
only necessary to add that he does not resemble 
in the least the selfish idealist, Hjalmar Ekdal, in 
The Wild Duck, who never works unless he has 
to, while Strindberg's literary labours have been 
enormous. Nor is it conceivable that the baron- 
ess, Madame Strindberg, furnished Ibsen with 
the documents for the portrait of the delightful 
Gina Ekdal. That woman was drawn from the 
people. Furthermore, to call Ibsen "the in- 
ventor of the equality madness " is absolutely 
a misstatement of a fact, as Ibsen has been a 
despiser of democracy and all forms of equality. 
161 



ICONOCLASTS 

Vvith an almost infinite capacity for suffering, 
let us hope that this great, bruised soul has 
found surcease from its mental suffering, found 
some gleams of consolation, in his calmer years 
— until his next psychical hegira. In rebel- 
ling against his existence, in refusing to accept 
the wisdom of the experienced, Strindberg has 
suffered intensely because his is an intense 
temperament. But he is a " culture hero," he 
has ''proved all things," and even from his 
hell he has brought us the history of experi- 
ences not to be forgotten. One is tempted to 
credit the alleged utterance of Ibsen, " Here is 
one who will be greater than I ! " 



e$* 



Ill 

HENRY BECQUE 

Emile Zola once wrote in his sweeping dic- 
tatorial manner, " Le theatre sera naturaliste 
ou il ne sera pas " ; but as Henry Becque said 
in his mordant style, Zola always convinced 
one in his pronunciamentos ; it was only when 
he attempted to put his theories into action that 
they completely broke down. Alas ! realism in 
the theatre after all the gong-sounding of cafe 
aestheticians, after the desperate campaigns of 
the one clairvoyant manager in the movement, 
Antoine, is as dead as the romanticism of Her- 
nani. After the flamboyant, the drab — and 
now they are both relegated to the limbo of the 
tried-and-found-wanting. 

When Zola sat down to pen his famous call 
to arms, Naturalism on the Stage, Antoine was 
still in the future, Dumas fits and Sardou ruled 
the Parisian theatre, Uncle Sarcey manufac- 
tured his diverting feuilletons, and Augier was 
become a classic. The author of L'Assommoir 
had like Alexander sighed for new worlds to 
subjugate. He had won a victory, thanks to 
Flaubert and the De Goncourts, in fiction ; it 
remained for the theatre to provoke his ire 

163 



ICONOCLASTS 

It still clung obstinately to old-fashioned con- 
ventions and refused to be coerced either by 
Henrietta Marechal or by the furious onslaught 
of Zola and his cohort of writing men. 

In the essay referred to, Zola said that a 
piece of work will always be a corner of nature 
seen through a temperament. He told the 
truth when he declared that the "romantic 
movement was but a skirmish ; romanticism, 
which corresponds to nothing durable, was 
simply a restless regret of the old world." 
Stendhal and Balzac had created the modern 
novel. The stage did not move with the other 
arts, though Diderot and Mercier " laid down 
squarely the basis of the naturalistic theatre." 
Victor Hugo gave the romantic drama its death- 
blow. Scribe was an ingenious cabinet-maker. 
Sardou " has no life — only movement." Dumas 
the younger was spoiled by cleverness — "a man 
of genius is not clever, and a man of genius is 
necessary to establish the naturalistic formula 
in a masterly fashion." Besides, Dumas 
preaches, always preaches. " Emile Augier 
is the real master of the French stage, the most 
sincere " ; but he did not know how to disen- 
gage himself from conventions, from stereotyped 
ideas, from made-up ideas. 

Who, then, was to be the saviour, according 
to Zola ? And this writer did not underrate 
the difficulties of the task. He knew that 
"She dramatic author was enclosed in a rigid 
frame, . . . that the solitary reader tolerates 
164 



HENRY BECQUE 

everything, goes where he is led, even when he 
is disgusted ; while the spectators taken en 
masse are seized with prudishness, with frights, 
with sensibilities of which the author must take 
notice under pain of a certain fall. But every- 
thing marches forward ! If the theatre will 
submit to Sardou's juggling, to the theories and 
witticisms of Dumas, to the sentimental char- 
acters of Augier, the theatre will be left in the on- 
ward movement of civilization " ; and as Becque 
said in his Souvenirs of a Dramatic Author, 
the theatre has reached its end many times, yet 
somehow it continues to flourish despite the 
gloomy prophecies of the professors and critical 
malcontents. Every season, avowed Becque, 
that same cry rises to heaven, — " La fin du 
theatre " ; and the next season the curtain rises 
in the same old houses, on the same old plays. 

However, Zola trumpeted forth his opinions. 
According to him the De Goncourt brothers 
were the first to put into motion realistic ideas. 
Henriette Marechal, with its dialogue copied 
from the spoken conversation of contemporary 
life, with its various scenes copied boldly from 
reality, was a path breaker. And Becque again 
interrupts ; Edmond de Goncourt posed for 
thirty years as a hissed author, " pour cette 
panade d'Henriette Marechal." Away with 
the mechanism of the polished, dovetailed, 
machine-made play of Dumas. " I yearn for 
life with its shiver, its breath, and its strength ; 
I long for life as it is," passionately declaimed 

165 



ICONOCLASTS 

the simple-minded bourgeois Zola, who then, 
in default of other naturalistic dramatists, 
turned his Therese Raquin into a play — 
and melodrama it was, not without its moments 
of power, but romantic and old-fashioned to a 
degree. 

And this was Zola's fate : he contumaciously 
usurped the throne of realism, never realizing 
his life long that he was a romanticist of the 
deepest dye, a follower of Hugo, that melo- 
dramatic taleteller. All the while he fancied 
himself a lineal descendant of Balzac and Flau- 
bert. Searching ceaselessly with his Diogenese 
lantern for a dramatist, he nevertheless over- 
looked not only a great one, but the true father 
of the latter-day movement in French dramatic 
literature — Henry Becque. What a paradox ! 
Here was the unfortunate Becque walking the 
boulevards night and day with plays under his 
arm, plays up his sleeve, plays in his hat, plays 
at home — and always was he shown the door, 
only to reappear at the managerial window. 
Calm in his superiority, his temper untouched 
by his trials, Becque presented the picture of 
the true Parisian man of genius, — witty, ironical 
on the subject of his misfortunes, and absolutely 
undaunted by refusals. He persisted until he 
forced his way into the Comedie Francaise, 
despite the intriguing, the disappointments, the 
broken promises, and the open hostility of 
Sarcey, then the reigning pontiff of French 
dramatic criticism. Jules Claretie pretended a 
166 



HENRY BECQUE 

sympathy that he did not feel, and it was only 
when pressure was brought by Edouard Thierry 
that his masterpiece, Les Corbeaux, was put 
on the stage after many disheartening delays; 
after it had been refused at the Vaudeville, the 
Gymnase, the Odeon, the Porte-Saint-Martin, 
the Gaite, the Cluny, and the Ambigu. Such 
perseverance is positively heroic. 

I know of few more diverting books than 
Becque's Memoirs and the record of his Literary 
Quarrels. If he was gay, careless, and un- 
spoiled by his failures in his daily existence, he 
must have saved his bile for his books. They 
are vitriolic. The lashing he gives Sarcey and 
Claretie is deadly. He had evidently put his 
revengeful feelings carefully away and only re- 
vived them when the time came, when his suc- 
cesses, his disciples, his election as the master 
of a powerful school, warranted his decanting 
the bitter vintage. How it sparkles, how it 
bites ! He pours upon the head of Sarcey his 
choicest irony. After snubbing the young 
Becque, after pompously telling him that he 
had no talent, that he should take Scribe for a 
model, Sarcey at the end, when he saw Becque 
as a possible strong figure in the dramatic world, 
calmly wrote : " Oh ! Becque I have known a 
long time. He brought me his first piece. He 
owes it to me that his The Prodigal Son was 
played." To cap his attack, Becque prints this 
statement at the end of the miserable history of 
his efforts to secure a footing. It is almost too 
167 



ICONOCLASTS 

good to be true. Diabolically clever also is his 
imitation of a Sarcey critique on Moliere, for 
Sarcey was no friend of character dramas. 

In his preface to The Ravens, Becque an- 
nounces that he is not a thinker, not a dreamer, 
not a psychologist, not a believer in heredity. 
As Jean Jullien truly said, the Becque plays 
prove nothing, are not photographic, are not 
deformations of life, but sincere life itself. The 
author relates that in composing — he had a 
large apartment on the rue de Matignon — he 
spent much time in front of a mirror searching 
for the exact gesture, for the exact glance of the 
eye, for the precise intonation. This fidelity to 
nature recalls a similar procedure of Flaubert, 
who chanted at the top of his formidable voice 
his phrases to hear if they would stand the test 
of breathing. Becque caught the just colour of 
every speech, and it is this preoccupation with 
essentials of his art that enabled him to set on 
their feet most solidly all his characters. They 
live, they have the breath of life in them ; when 
they walk or talk, we believe in them. The peep 
he permits us to take into his workshop is of 
much value to the student. 

He admired Antoine, naturally, and his opin- 
ion of Zola I have recorded. He rapped Bru- 
netiere sharply over the knuckles for assuming 
that criticism conserves the tradition of litera- 
ture. Vain words, cries Becque ; literature 
makes itself despite criticism, it is ever in ad- 
vance of the critics. Only a sterile art is the 
i68 



HENRY BECQUE 

result of academies. Curiously enough, Becque 
had a consuming admiration for Sardou. Him 
he proclaimed the real master, the man of imagi- 
nation, observation, the masterly manipulator of 
the character of characters. This is rather dis- 
concerting to those who admire in the Becque 
plays just those qualities in which Sardou is de- 
ficient. Perhaps the fact that Sardou absolutely 
forced the production of Becque's L' Enfant Pro- 
digue may have accentuated his praise of that 
prestidigitator of Marly. Becque entertained a 
qualified opinion of Ibsen and an overwhelming 
feeling for Tolstoy as dramatist. The Rus- 
sian's Powers of Darkness greatly affected the 
Frenchman. (Becque was born in 1837, died 
in 1900.) 

And what is this naturalistic formula of 
Becque's that escaped the notice of the zealous 
Zola and set the pace for nearly all the younger 
men ? Is it not the absence of a formula of the 
tricks of construction religiously handed down 
by the Scribe-Sardou school ? As is generally 
the case, the disciples have gone their master 
one better in their disdain of solid workmanship. 
The taint of the artificial, of the sawdust, is 
missing in Becque's masterpieces ; yet with all 
their large rhythms, unconventional act-ends, 
and freedom from the cliM, there is no ragged- 
ness in detail; indeed, close study reveals the 
presence of a delicate, intricate mechanism, so 
shielded by the art of the dramatist as to illude 
us into believing that we are in the presence of 
169 



ICONOCLASTS 

unreasoned reality. Setting aside his pessimism, 
his harsh handling of character, his seeming 
want of sympathy, — a true objectivity, for he 
never takes sides with his characters, — Becque 
is as much a man of the theatre as Sardou. He 
saw the mad futility of the literary men who in- 
vaded the theatre full of arrogant belief in their 
formulas, in their newer conventions that would 
have supplanted older ones. A practical play- 
wright, our author had no patience with those 
who attempted to dispense with the frame of the 
footlights, who would turn the playhouse into a 
literary farm through which would gambol all 
sorts of incompetents masquerading as original 
dramatic thinkers. 

Becque's major quality is his gift of lifelike 
characterization. Character with him is of prime 
importance. He did not tear down the structure 
of the drama but merely removed much of the 
scaffolding which time had allowed to disfigure 
its facade. While Zola and the rest were devising 
methods for doing away with the formal drama, 
Becque sat reading Moliere. Moliere is his real 
master — Moliere and life, as Augustin Filon 
truthfully says. In his endeavour to put before 
us his people in a simple, direct way he did 
smash several conventions. He usually lands 
his audience in the middle of the action, omit- 
ting the old-fashioned exposition act, careful 
preparation, and sometimes development, as we 
know it in the well-regulated drama. But search 
for his reasons and they are not long concealed. 
170 



HENRY BECQUE 

Logical he is, though it is not the cruel logic 
of Paul Hervieu, his most distinguished artistic 
descendant. The logic of Becque's events must 
retire before the logic of his characters, that is 
all. Humanity, then, is his chief concern. He 
cares little for literary style. He is not a stylist, 
though he has style — the stark, individual style 
of Henry Becque. 

Complications, catastrophe, denouement, all 
these are attenuated in the Becque plays. At- 
mosphere supplies the exposition, character 
painting, action. The impersonality of the 
dramatist is profound. If he had projected 
himself or his views upon the scene, then we 
would have been back with Dumas and his 
preachments. Are we returning to the Moliere 
comedy of character ? Movement in the ac- 
cepted sense there is but little. Treatment and 
interpretation have been whittled away to a 
mere profile, so that in the Antoine repertory 
the anecdote bluntly expressed and dumped on 
the boards a slice of real life without comment 
— without skill, one is tempted to add. 

Becque was nearer classic form than Hervieu, 
Donnay, De Curel, Georges Ancey, Leon Hen- 
nique, Emile Fabre, Maurice Donnay, Lemaitre, 
Henri Lavedan, and the rest of the younger 
group that delighted in honouring him with the 
title of supreme master. After all, Becque's 
was a modified naturalism. He recognized the 
limitations of his material, and subdued his hand 
to them. M. Filon has pointed out that Becque 
171 



ICONOCLASTS 

and his followers tried to bring their work " into 
line with the philosophy of Taine," as Dumas 
and Augier's ideas corresponded with those of 
Victor Cousin, the eclectic philosopher. Posi- 
tivism, rather than naked realism, is Becque's 
note. The cold-blooded pessimism that per- 
vades so unpleasantly many of his comedies 
was the resultant of a temperament sorely tried 
by experience, and one steeped in the material- 
ism of the Second Empire. 

So we get from him the psychology of the 
crowd, instead of the hero ego of earlier drama- 
tists. He contrives a dense atmosphere, into 
which he plunges his puppets, and often his 
people appear cold, heartless, cynical. He is a 
surgeon, more like Ibsen than he would ever 
acknowledge, in his calm exposure of social 
maladies. And what a storehouse have been 
his studies of character for the generation suc- 
ceeding him ! Becque forged the formula, the 
others but developed it. 

The Becque plays ! The last edition is in 
three volumes published by La Plume of Paris. 
It begins with an opera — fancy an opera by 
this antagonist of romance ! — entitled Sar- 
danapale, in three acts, ''imitated" from Lord 
Byron. Victorin Joncieres, a composer of re- 
spectable ability, furnished the music. The 
" machine " was represented for the first time 
at the Theatre Lyrique, February 8, 1867. It 
need not detain us. L' Enfant Prodigue, a four- 
act vaudeville, saw the light, November 6, 1868, 
172 



HENRY BECQUE 

at the Theatre Vaudeville. It is Becque at his 
wittiest, merriest best. In an unpremeditated 
manner it displays a mastery of intrigue that is 
amazing. For a man who despised mere tech- 
nical display, this piece is a shining exemplar 
of virtuosity. Let those who would throw stones 
at Becque's nihilism in the matter of conven- 
tional craftsmanship read The Prodigal Son and 
marvel at its swiftness of action, its stripping 
the vessel of all unnecessary canvas, and scudding 
along under bare poles ! The comedy is unfail- 
ing, the characterization rich in those cunning 
touches which are like salt applied to a smart- 
ing wound. The plot is slight, the adventures 
of several provincials who visit Paris and there 
become entangled in the toils of a shrewd ad- 
venturess. The underplot is woven skilfully 
into the main texture. Hypocrisy is scourged. 
A father and a son discover that they are trapped 
by the same woman. There is genre painting 
that is Dutch in its admirable minuteness and 
truth ; a specimen is the scene at the concierge's 
dinner. Wicked in the quality called V esprit 
gau/ois, this farce is inimitable — and also a trifle 
old-fashioned. 

In Michel Pauper, — given at the Porte-Saint- 
Martin, June, 1 870, — Becque was feeling his way 
to simpler methods. The drama is in five acts 
and seven tableaux ; and while it contains in 
solution all of Becque, it may be confessed that 
the outcome is rather an indigestible mess. 
The brutality of the opening scenes is undeni- 
173 



ICONOCLASTS 

able. Michel is a clumsy fellow, who does not 
always retain our sympathy or respect. His 
courtship has all the delicacy of a peasant at 
pasture. But he is alive, his is a salient char- 
acter. The suicide of De La Roseraye has been 
faithfully copied by Donnay in La Douloureuse, 
and by many others in Paris, London, and Amer- 
ica. Helene, poor girl, who is so rudely treated 
by Comte de Rivailler, would call forth a smile on 
the countenance of any one when she announces 
her misfortune in this stilted phraseology, " He 
asked of his own will what he could not obtain 
from mine." The ending has a suspicion of the 
" arranged," even of the violent melodramatic. 
And how shocking is the fall of Helene ! She 
is the first of the Becque cerebral female mon- 
sters, though she has at least more blood than 
some of his later creations. She loves the 
Count — the shadow of an excuse for her de- 
struction of her noble-minded husband. How- 
ever, one does not read Michel Pauper for 
amusement. 

It is in L'Enlevement that we find Becque 
managing with consummate address a genuine 
problem. It was produced at the Vaudeville, 
November 18, 1871. The three acts pass at a 
chateau in the provinces. Emma de Sainte- 
Croix, rather than endure the neglect and in- 
fidelities of her husband, lives in dignified 
retirement with her mother-in-law. She is a 
femme savante, though not of the odious blue- 
stocking variety. She has a daily visitor in the 
174 



HENRY BECQUE 

person of a cultivated man who resides in the 
neighbourhood. At once we are submerged in 
a situation. De La Rouvre loves Emma. He, 
too, has been wretchedly mismated. His wife 
was a despicable voluptuary who cheated him 
with his domestics. He begs Emma to secure 
a divorce from her pleasure-loving husband. 
She refuses. She loathes the divorce courts. 
She loathes vulgar publicity. He proposes an 
elopement and is sharply brought to his senses 
by the woman. She loves the proprieties too 
much to indulge in romantic adventures, and 
has she not suffered enough through this love 
illusion? Her mother-in-law does not approve 
of the man's presence. Her son is always her 
son, and she hopes for reconciliation. If only 
Emma would be a little more lenient ! 

The prodigal husband returns. He is an 
admirable blackguard who respects neither his 
own honour nor that of his family. He flirts with 
his wife at his mother's instigation, but his heart 
is not in the game. Descends upon him one of 
his lady loves. She invades the chateau and is 
introduced to his wife as a supposedly casual 
passer-by. But she is detected as the worthless 
spouse of De La Rouvre. There is a scene. 
Later Raoul, the husband, forces his way into 
his wife's bedchamber and the episode on 
reading recalls Paul Hervieu's Le D£dale. The 
outcome, however, is different. Repulsed, the 
husband curses his wife, and she departs for 
India, elopes with her lover. Terse in dialogue, 
175 



ICONOCLASTS 

compact in construction, L' Enlevement contains 
some of the best of Becque. Ibsen and Dumas 
are writ large in the general plan and denoue- 
ment, though the character drawing is wholly 
Becque's. Despite his economy of action and 
speech, he seldom gives one the feeling of 
abruptness in transitional passages. His scenes 
melt one into the other without a jar, and only 
after you have read or watched one of his plays 
do you realize the labour involved to produce such 
an illusion of life while disguising the controlling 
mechanism. All the familiar points de reperes, 
the little tricks so dear to the average play- 
maker, are absent. Becque conceals his tech- 
nical processes, and in that sense he has great 
art, though often seeming quite artless. And 
L'Enlevement is more than a picture of man- 
ners ; it is as definitely a problem play as A 
Doll's House. Only after being driven to it 
does Emma revolt. She is a revoltte of the 
cerebral type. The crowning insult is the at- 
tempt made upon her right to her person. 
Hervieu's heroine is passional, and it accounts 
for her lapse. We feel for her acutely. Emma's 
departure is logical. 

With La Parisienne, Becque is once more on 
his own ground. Paris and its cynical view of 
the relations of the sexes is embodied in this 
diabolically adroit and disconcerting comedy — 
represented for the first time at the Comedie- 
Frangaise, September 14, 1882, and reviewed at 
the Odeon, November 3, 1897. The play is full 
176 



HENRY BECQUE 

of a blague now slightly outmoded, but the types 
remain eternally true — those of the Parisian 
triangle. Only this three-cornered, even four- 
cornered, arrangement (for there are two " dear 
friends "•) is played with amazing variations. 

Clotilde du Mesnil and Lafont are quarrelling 
over a letter when the curtain rises. He adjures 
her to resist temptation. " Resist, Clotilde ; that 
is the only honourable course, and the only course 
worthy of you." She must remain dignified, hon- 
ourable, the pride of her husband. Suddenly, 
in the midst of this ignoble squabble, she cries, 
" Prenez garde, voila, mon mari ! " Up to this 
moment the audience fancies that it has been 
witnessing a marital row. The shock is tre- 
mendous when the truth is learned. Nor are 
your feelings spared when later you hear Clotilde 
accuse Lafont of not being fond of her husband. 
The two wrangle over the accusation. In an- 
other speech she exclaims : " Vous etes un libre 
penseur ! Je crois que vous vous entendriez tres 
bien avec une maitresse qui n'aurait pas de 
religion, quelle horreur ! " This extremely naive 
statement reveals to us the land on the other side 
of good and evil in which dwell Becque's char- 
acters. Are they even cynical? Hardly, for 
there is no mockery, no parade of immorality, 
no speeches with equivocal meanings. The 
calm assumption of external decency is merely 
a reversion to the baldest paganism. It is the 
modern over-cynicism. These people are so bad 
that, paradoxical as it may sound, they are good 
177 



ICONOCLASTS 

Certainly they are more refreshing and infinitely 
more moral than that wretched Camille, with 
her repentant whimperings and her nauseating 
speeches about soiled doves and their redemp- 
tion. 

And Lafont, stupid, loving, honest according 
to his lights, Lafont so marvellously presented 
by Antoine, is he not a being who lives ! Clotilde 
as incarnated by Rejane is the worldling, neither 
stupid nor witty. She is simply a good-natured, 
vain woman, who deceives her husband and lover 
as naturally as she breathes. 

Clotilde takes on a new amant, who treats 
her as badly as she treated Lafont. Deserted, 
she picks up the old thread and begins to live 
as before. As Mrs. Craigie says of this play : 
"There are critics who mistaking the situa- 
tion for the philosophy have called this piece 
immoral. One would as soon call Georges 
Dandin or Tom Jones immoral. A true book, a 
true play, cannot be otherwise than moral. It 
is the false picture — no matter how pretty — 
which makes for immorality." 

Throughout, these lovers quarrel like married 
folk. The social balance is upset, domestic 
virtues topsy-turvied. And yet the merciless 
stripping of the conventional romance, — the 
deluded husband, unhappy wife, and charming 
consoler of the afflicted, — these old properties 
of Gallic comedy are cast into the dust-bin. 
It is safe to say that since La Parisienne no 
French dramatic author has had the courage 

i 7 8 



HENRY BECQUE 

to revive the sentimental triangle as it was 
before this comedy was written. If he ven- 
tured to, he would be laughed off the stage. 
And for suppressing the sentimental married 
harlot let us be thankful to the memory of 
Becque. 

Les Corbeaux is unique in modern comedy. 
Never played, to my knowledge, in English, its 
ideas, its characterization, its ground-plan, have 
been often ruthlessly appropriated. The verb "to 
steal" is never conjugated in theatreland. Yet 
this play's simplicity is appealing. A loving 
father of a family, a good-tempered bourgeois, 
dies suddenly. His affairs turn out badly. His 
widow and three daughters fall into the hands 
of the ravens, the partner of their father, his 
lawyer, his architect, and a motley crew of 
tradespeople. Ungrateful matter this for dra- 
matic purposes. Scene by scene Becque exposes 
the outer and inner life of these defenceless 
women and their secret and malign persecu- 
tors. Every character is an elaborate portrait. 
Naturally, the family go to the dogs, and the 
wickedest villain of the lot catches in marriage 
the flower of the unhappy flock. His final 
speech is sublime, " My child, since your father's 
death you were hemmed in by a lot of designing 
scoundrels." And by inference he pats himself 
on the back, he, the worst scoundrel of all. 
If you tell me that the theme is not a pleasant 
or suitable one for the drama, I shall recommend 
you to the spirit of the late Henry Becque for 
179 



ICONOCLASTS 

answer. Les Corbeaux is the bible of the dra- 
matic realists. 

Remain seven small pieces, principally in one 
act. La Navette is wicked — and amusing. It 
aims at nothing else. Les Honnetes Femmes 
might have been written by Dumas. It is a 
sugar-coated sermon extemporized by a young 
married woman for the benefit of a presumptive 
lover. She finds him a bride, and the curtain 
falls. Le Depart is of sterner metal. Here 
Becque beats Zola at his own game. The scene 
represents a working girl's atelier in a Parisian 
store. The various women are clearly outlined, 
so clearly that Huysmans in Soeurs Vatard is 
recalled. One girl is honest. She is honourable 
enough to refuse an offer of marriage made by 
the foolish young son of the proprietor, and for 
this wisdom receives insults from the father and 
is finally discharged for being too virtuous. She 
then incontinently goes to the devil. The 
devastating irony of the dramatist illuminates 
this little piece with sinister effect. And the 
moral is never far to seek in Becque — perhaps 
a twisted moral, yet not altogether a negligible 
one. In Veuve we find our old friend Clotilde 
of La Parisienne, now a widow. Her behaviour 
to her faithful admirer is a study of feminine 
malice, not only seen " through a temperament," 
but the outcome of unerring observation. Made- 
leine is a depressing sketch of a woman with a 
past who is educating her child at a convent 
It has poignant moments. The other two little 
I So 



HENRY BECQUE 

affairs, Le Domino a Quart and Une Execution, 
are exercises in pure humour of the volatile 
Parisian sort. 

Becque's touch is light in comedy, rather 
clumsy in set drama. He is, as a rule, without 
charm, and he never indulges in mock pathos or 
cheap poetic flights. He excelled in depicting 
manners, and his dramatic method, as I have 
endeavoured to show, was direct and free from 
antique rhetoric and romantic turgidities. He 
has been superseded by a more comprehensive 
synthesis; France is become weary of the cyni- 
cal sinners — yet that does not invalidate the 
high ranking of this man of genius. Whatever 
may be his deficiencies in the purely spiritual, 
Henry Becque will ever remain a command- 
ing figure in the battalion of brilliant French 
dramatists. 



181 



IV 

GERHART HAUPTMANN 

Der Mensch, das ist ein Ding 
Das sich von ungefahr bei uns verfing : 
Von dieser Welt und doch auch nicht von ihr: 
Zur Halfte — wo ? wer weiss ? — zur Halfte hier. 
Halb unser Bruder und aus uns Geboren 
Uns feind und freund zur Halfte und verloren. 

— Die Versunkene Glocke. 

In the figure of Gerhart Hauptmann we 
encounter a man of genius, a man of Euro- 
pean significance, and more than the standard- 
bearer of Young Germany. True, Hauptmann 
did graduate from the seminary of the real- 
ists, — the heads of which were Arno Holz and 
Johannes Schlaf, — writing, under the name of 
Bjarne P. Holmsen, that delectable, ironic fan- 
tasy, Papa Hamlet. But the dramatic poetic 
instincts of the Silesian youth — he was born 
at Salzbrunn, 1862, the son of a hotel-keeper — 
were not long to be penned behind the bars of 
a formula. As in Goethe's Faust, two spirits 
travailed furiously within him. Ultra-idealist 
in his boyhood, he suffered from the green- 
sickness of Byronism, and wrote poems in imi- 
tation of Byron, Hebbel, Schiller. He studied 
sculpture at Rome for a time and set up an 
l8* 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

atelier there. His epic, Promethidenlos (1885), 
was as subjective as a restless, unhappy young 
man of twenty-three could make it. Yet there 
is no mistaking the chord set clanging by its 
immature music — the chord of sympathy with 
human suffering, the true Hauptmann leit motiv 
that may be equally heard in his first drama, 
Before Sunrise, and in his latest, Rose Bernd. 
The critical allotment of Hauptmann to the 
Ibsen domain is easy, too easy; he has been 
greatly influenced by the " red star of the 
north," though it has not been a baleful one. 
He owes as much to Zola as to Ibsen, as Zola 
owes in his turn much to Victor Hugo and Jean 
Jacques Rousseau. Young Germany itself, Karl 
Bleibtreu, Conrad Alberti, Sudermann, Halbe, 
Conradi, Kretzer, and the rest were in the fash- 
ioning of the Freie Bilhne heavily indebted to 
Antoine and his revolutionary Theatre Libre. 
Under the spell of the mystic and lyric prose 
of Friedrich Nietzsche — surely among the 
most musical that issued from German lips — 
individualism became an all-absorbing element 
in the production of art works. It was the old 
leaven of Max Stirner and his Der Einzige. John 
Henry Mackay, the Scotch-German, hymned in 
almost delirious verse the rights of the Ego; 
even the cool-headed East Prussian Sudermann 
felt the impact of this lyric anarchism when 
he published his Three Heron Feathers. As to 
Hauptmann, whose lyre was ever more sensi- 
tive to the mobility of the moral atmosphere, 

183 



ICONOCLASTS 

this wind of individualism swept him along and 
he wrote Before Sunrise. It was produced in 
1889, and at once its author was recognized as 
a force. 

Socialistic, this play is almost as rank as La 
Terre. Technically it has many weak spots, 
but the basic idea is capital. The Krauses, 
suddenly come into money, afforded the drama- 
tist opportunities for his still immature but pro- 
foundly true gifts of characterization. It is a 
depressing crowd he sets before us, drunken- 
ness being the least of its defects. Helene 
Krause is betrothed to the lover of her step- 
mother, and when Alfred Loth, a high-minded 
socialist, appears, she naturally falls in love with 
him. Loth, warned by a doctor — an excel- 
lently conceived character — that it were insane 
to marry into a tainted family, leaves a letter 
for Helene and vanishes. She promptly kills 
herself. The final curtain is harrowing. There 
is exaggerated realism and also that curious 
tendency, which has developed instead of abat- 
ing, of dealing with depraved types. Friedens- 
fest (1890), which followed, begins to show 
Hauptmann more conscious of his own talents. 
The Scholz family is accurately studied and 
presented. The denouement baldly stated^ 
an unhappy father come home to die in a 
household from which he has been banished 
by his conduct — smacks of German sentimen. 
tality. Here the poet demonstrated that all 
lies in the individual handling of the theme* 
184 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

The moral is " Peace on earth, good will to 
men," and this unhappy pessimistic family is 
made to realize the strength of the collectivist 
ideal. The same year Einsame Menschen ap- 
peared, in which Ibsen's influence is paramount. 
It reads like a variant of Rosmersholm, diluted 
though it be. If it proves anything, it is that 
the unpurified is to be distrusted because it 
brings unhappiness in its train. The Vockerat 
family is a fairly contented group until the 
appearance of Anna Mahr, a young woman 
from Zurich University who has absorbed the 
unsettling culture of the day. She speedily un- 
seats the judgment of John Volkerat, and in 
becoming his affinity she makes him neglect 
his lovely wife. It is all so Ibsenian that we 
note with a sense of the incongruous the scene 
of the action, the Miiggelsee near Berlin. John 
hates the religion of his parents, becomes es- 
tranged from these kindly folk, throws himself 
on the mercy of Anna, who, after lecturing him 
in the true-blue cerebral style of the emanci- 
pated woman, goes away. Distracted, the young 
man drowns himself. 

Notwithstanding technical and psychologic 
advances, this effort is not so convincing as 
Before Sunrise. One feels the thesis prepared, 
the task attacked, and not the spontaneous work 
of art. Charles Henry Meltzer, Hauptmann's 
friend and English translator, declares that 
Before Sunrise was written while the poet was 
still filled with admiration of Tolstoy's Dominion 

'85 



ICONOCLASTS 

of Darkness, and after many conversations with 
Arno Holz and Bruno Wille, the socialist. In one 
respect it is very remarkable — the evocation 
of atmosphere. And some critics see in Anna 
Mahr a forerunner to Hilda Wangel of The 
Master Builder. 

When, however, Die Weber was printed ( 1 892), 
all Germany knew that the master had appeared. 
It was not until February, 1893, that the first 
performances took place on the Freie Buhne, 
Deutsches Theatre, Berlin. The drama stands 
at the parting of the ways. Not since Wagner's 
Die Meistersinger had such an attempt been made 
to clear the German stage of its gingerbread rhet- 
oric, its pasteboard mock-antiques, its moonshine 
romantics. And while the Wagner comedy was 
all grace, sweetness, and light and only epical 
in its vast machinery of narration, The Weavers 
was a quivering transcript from life — and such 
life ! Germany took fire from the blaze of the 
dramatist's generous wrath. Socialism or an- 
archy, what you will, were swallowed up in the 
presentment of this veracious document of 
wretched lives. Yet, while its tendenz is unmis- 
takably an arraignment of the wealthy classes, 
of the bourgeois master weavers, as is Zola's 
stern denunciation in Germinal of unfeeling 
mine owners, Hauptmann, being the finer artist, 
does not drive his lesson home with a moral 
sledge-hammer. He paints the picture ; his au- 
dience finds the indictment. Here is a new 
German art at last. 

1 86 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

And not altogether unprepared for this violent 
drama should have been his admirers. His short 
nouvelle, Bahnwarter Thiel, is full of pity for 
the downtrodden. This story sounds like a trans- 
position of a Zola melodrama to a finer key. The 
companion tale in the same volume, The Apostle, 
might have been written by Dostoievsky. 
v In Die Weber, — or De Waber, as it is called 
in the patois of Silesia, — Hauptmann is for the 
first time Hauptmann. Zola and Ibsen are no 
longer felt, for the resemblance to An Enemy 
of the People is of the vaguest. Henceforth it 
is the masses, not the individual. Raised in the 
weaving districts of Silesia, his grandfather a 
weaver and a witness of a similar strike with its 
dire consequences, — Robert Hauptmann, his 
father, also sat at the loom — the subject was 
one that could be treated with epic breadth and 
eloquence by the poet./ The mob is the hero, 
for old Hilfe is only a representative of his class. 
Baumert the soldier, Ansorge, the women, the 
blind wife, and the climax where old Hilfe is 
dead and the little Mielchen tells with babyish 
joy the story of the shooting — every character, 
every incident, rings true, and rang so widely 
and so well that it set pealing the bells of the 
world. Clf Hauptmann had died after writing 
Die Weber, he would have been acclaimed a 
great dramatist. 

It was Matthew Arnold who Englished 
Joubert's soul's cry, "You hurt me!" In this 
moving and gloomy and largely planned tragedy 

187 



ICONOCLASTS 

of the lowly, Hauptmann holds no brief for an- 
archy, plays upon no class sentiment. He seems 
as objective as Flaubert, yet no play that I ever 
witnessed is such a judgment of man and his 
cruelty to his fellow-beings. 

The ancients, who sounded the abysmal depths 
of despair, crime, and terror, nevertheless con- 
trived some relief ; if no other, the artistic form 
itself palliated the awful content of a tragedy of 
./Eschylus. But Hauptmann, with absolute in- 
difference to our moral epidermis, strips bare for 
us human nature, and we revolt naturally enough. 
The truth, naked and unadorned, is always un- 
pleasant. Pascal once wrote : " When I see 
the blindness and the misery of man ; when I 
survey the whole dumb universe and man with- 
out light, left to himself and lost, as it were, in 
this corner of the universe, not knowing who 
placed him here, what he has come to do, what 
will become of him when he dies, and incapable 
of any knowledge whatever, I fall into terror, 
like that of a man who, having been carried in 
his sleep to an island, desert and terrible, should 
awake ignorant of his whereabouts and with no 
means of escape, and therefore I wonder how 
those in so miserable a state do not fall into 
despair." What would he not have written after 
witnessing this play ? 

The Weavers is a parable. The Weavers is a 
symphony in five movements, with one grim, lead- 
ing motive — hunger. In every act you hear that 
ominous, that sickening word " hunger." The 
188 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

necessity of such a play is chilling to our pam- 
pered and capricious appetites. Hunger ! What 
a horrible theme for an art work ! The north- 
ern novelist, Knut Hamsum, has in a more per- 
sonal style used the same theme. We love 
blithe art, art imbued with deep serenity, — 
heiterkeit, Winckelmann called it, — so away with 
this grim phantom, evoked by a ruthless imagi- 
nation ! But what if it be true ? That is the affair 
of the Commissioner of Charities. We pay our 
taxes. Go to, Herr Hauptmann, go to ! We 
prefer illusionists, not unmaskers of grim truths. 
Yet hunger! 

"There is," wrote Thomas Hardy, "a size at 
which dignity begins ; farther on there is a size 
at which grandeur begins ; farther on there is a 
size at which solemnity begins ; farther on a size 
at which ghastliness begins." 

The novelist was speaking of the interstellar 
universe. In Die Weber there are depths where 
ghastliness begins. It is not a play, it is a chorale 
of woe, malediction, and want. The people, hardly 
civilized, are put before us, a marvellous vitascope 
of pain and disease. What avails criticism before 
such a spectacle ? 

It is hardly necessary to recapitulate the 
grewsome story of this play — how the weavers 
starved, how the weavers revolted, and that 
wonderful ending, old age stiffened in death 
and childhood merrily unconscious. It recalls 
Victor Hugo's precipice with its single cran- 
nied rose in full bloom. And The Weavers 
189 



ICONOCLASTS 

was the first modern play that deals with the 
life of the proletarians. 

College Crampton (1892), Der Biberpelz 
(1893), Hannele (1893), Florian Geyer (1896), 
Die Versunkene Glocke(i897), Fuhrmann Hen- 
schel(i898), Schluck und Jau (1900), Michael 
Kramer (1900), Der rote Hahn (1901), Der 
Arme Heinrich (1902), Rose Bernd (1903), 
complete the list thus far of this fecund and 
remarkable man. He has felt his way through 
naturalistic drama to comedy, and in the latter 
without much success ; and from comedy to 
historical drama, with no success at all; in- 
deed, Florian Geyer was a failure, though in its 
amended version as given last October 22, in 
Berlin, at the Lessing Theatre, it won approval, 
critical and popular. The poet has written a 
new five-act comedy for the same theatre, which 
he calls The Merry Maiden of Bishopsberg. 

The Beaver-Coat and The Red Cock — the 
symbol of fire — are folk-plays, the comedy 
rather grim, the sense of actuality strong. The 
first is a " thieves' comedy " and the fooling is 
heavy enough in both pieces ; the latter is a 
continuation. German officialism is parodied. 
Schluck und Jau was also a failure. Written 
partially in prose and verse, it recalls Calderon, 
Grillparzer, Shakespeare's prologue to The Tam- 
ing of the Shrew, and Hauptmann himself. Al- 
though Fuhrmann Henschel followed Hannele 
and The Sunken Bell, we prefer to speak of it and 
several other plays before those two masterpieces 
190 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

Wagoner Henschel was a surprise and a deep 
disappointment to many of Hauptmann's admir- 
ers. He seemed to return to the most sordid 
of topics, yet it contains passages of spiritual 
beauty ; while as a whole the note it sounds is 
a supernatural one, despite the vileness of its 
surroundings. The psychologic depiction of 
Henschel's downfall is masterly. He is a stolid 
teamster whose first wife in her death-bed makes 
him promise not to marry the servant girl, 
Hanna Scholl. But he does, for some one must 
look after his daughter. The moral degringolade 
begins. The woman is a vicious slattern. She 
is unfaithful. Things go badly. Henschel 
comes to believe that his first wife haunts him, 
and kills himself. It is very morbid, but it fits 
in the Hauptmann scheme, as Professor J. F. 
Coar in his Studies in German Literature shows : 
" Hannele contrasted spiritual consciousness with 
moral consciousness. And Henry in The Sunken 
Bell fails because he attempts what his creator, 
Hauptmann, attempted in Hannele. How, then, 
shall a poet find his quest rewarded? Only 
by seeking the spiritual mirrored in the moral. 
Hauptmann is far from having such a vision in 
Teamster Henschel; still he is to be credited 
with the effort to obtain it. Again, he could 
only see the misery of life. ... In constantly 
narrowing circles the thoughts of Henschel turn 
about the one tense feeling of wrong committed 
when he married again in violation of his promise. 
The infidelity of the second wife appears to him 
191 



ICONOCLASTS 

like the judgment of God. ... At night the 
figure of his dead wife lies down with him. . . . 
There is no trace of dialectical reasoning in this 
simple Silesian teamster. He stands facing ex- 
istence without the ability to apply his reason to 
anything but the humdrum affairs of life. Once 
forced beyond the bounds of these, reason gives 
way, and he is gradually led into a pessimistic 
fatalism from which there is no escape. But to 
create by transforming spiritual life into moral 
action is the law of individual existence, and 
men, as Hauptmann sees them, are in the world 
for this purpose." 

On the material side Fuhrmann Henschel 
might be called a drama of insomnia. The major- 
ity of the Hauptmann plays record the struggle 
of mankind to widen its spiritual horizon. Col- 
lege Crampton is an exception. It is merely 
an entertaining piece shorn of tragic meanings. 
Moreover, it contains some excellent comedy 
and characterization. The hero — a sorry one 
— drinks. Michael Kramer ends with the sui- 
cide of a foolish talented young fellow, who is 
jeered to the desperate deed by a lot of idlers in 
a Silesian cafe. The types are local. Kramer, 
his father, is an austere artist. The milieu is 
the artistic, though as drama we are never carried 
off our feet. Loosely joined episodes and too 
much dialogue mar the piece. There are, how- 
ever, many deft touches, and the scene wherein 
Kramer views his dead son is full of reserve 
power and suggestiveness. Nearly ail these 
192 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

plays enumerated thus far are irregular on the 
constructive side, withal effective and human. 
Hauptmann has ever been careless in his tech- 
nics. The well-made play is never in his 
thoughts, for he works from within to external 
details. Even in his imitative period he betrayed 
this creative impulse. 

Der Arme Heinrich is not Hauptmann at 
his happiest, despite rare flashes of beauty and 
power in this replica of a mediaeval miracle 
play. The theme is unpleasant, a leprous 
knight rescued by the unselfish pure love of 
a maiden — an idea as old as The Flying Dutch- 
man, though set forth in different terms, framed 
by another environment. It is rather to Hannele 
and Die Versunkene Glocke we must turn for 
the greater Hauptmann. 

In Hannele and in his other dramatic produc- 
tions he has proved himself to possess in a con- 
summate degree the art of arousing certain 
emotions, of presenting most vividly certain 
types which have excited his brain into abnor- 
mal activity ; above all he knows the art of con- 
trasts. He is an idealist, he is a realist, he is 
a religionist, he is a natural philosopher. After 
carefully analyzing Hannele, on is tempted to 
pronounce it the work of a transcendental 
realist. 

The play is the history of a child's soul. It 
is a psychological study of the brain of a wretched 
little outcast, who, just before her death, experi- 
ences delirious trances, in vhich condition the 
193 



ICONOCLASTS 

events and personages of her unhappy life be- 
come objective visions, and these visions are 
seen by the audience. The story is so simply, 
so chastely told that one marvels effects can be 
produced by a verbal machinery of such sim- 
plicity. The disgust inspired by the quarrelling, 
fetid crew of beggars in the almshouse gives 
way to feelings of the most profound pity at the 
entrance of the poor little would-be suicide. 
Her first words, "I'm afraid," inspire sensations 
of pity at her condition, and horror of the brute 
who drove her to the commission of such a des- 
perate deed. Hauptmann's touch is so true, so 
tender, that he evokes with ease the whole past 
of this wretched girl, whose existence has been 
one of blows, curses, kicks, and starvation. Her 
undeveloped soul, cramped as it had been by 
her neglected life, has awakened under the 
kindnesses of her teacher Gottwald, and how 
natural that he should be invested by her with 
almost supernatural attributes ! 

Hauptmann conveys all this and more through 
the half-scared utterances of Hannele, who re- 
fuses to respond to the pertinacious question- 
ings of Magistrate Berger, and only speaks when 
Gottwald asks her to. She appears to be a stub- 
born girl, but it is a stubbornness born of hard 
beatings and harsh language. She has been the 
butt of the village children, and the one ray of 
light which has entered her life is her teacher, 
and through him some glimmerings of religion. 
Heaven to her is a place all golden glory, whose 
194 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

Lord is overflowing with pity for unhappy chil- 
dren, and where she can eat, drink, and be 
warm. She has been half starved and turned 
out in the streets on biting cold winter nights. 
It is most natural that she should long earnestly 
for this heaven, and her appeals to be allowed 
to die, so that she could see the Lord, are elo- 
quent to a degree. She is only a beggar girl, 
this Hannele, and Hauptmann gives her to us 
in all her rags and misery, and free from mawk- 
ish sentimentality. 

Pity is the dominating note of the play, espe- 
cially in part first; Hannele's bruised body, 
shrinking, sensitive soul, arouse the deepest 
pity. The transition to an atmosphere where 
the elements of awe and fear enter is quietly 
accomplished by the dramatist. Hannele's de- 
lirium is the medium. When she first appears 
in the strong arms of her teacher she is numbed 
by the icy waters of the pond, but the warmth 
of the hot drink and the hot bricks soon revive 
her and she wanders a little in her speech. She 
tells Gottwald that it was the Lord who beckoned 
to her in the water, and when she is left alone 
with Sister Martha, she screams with fear at the 
sight of old Daddy Pleschke's hat and coat, 
which hang at the foot of her miserable bed. 
The child thinks she sees her stepfather. 

But mark the skill of Hauptmann. After she 
is left alone her dreams begin to assume a more 
definite shape, and then we, sitting in the dark- 
ened auditorium, see Mattern, the mason, her 
195 



ICONOCLASTS 

brute of a stepfather, as a vile nightmare. He 
acts and speaks to the little form on the bed as 
he would in real life, and it writhes in agony, 
and finally Hannele, her brain on fire with the 
hideous vision, awakens to his call, and jumps 
tremblingly out of bed, rushes into a corner for 
shelter, and there faints. 

The return of Sister Martha, the replacing of 
Hannele on her couch, are followed by the further 
progress of the fever and delirium. Being alone, 
a vision of her mother appears. It is the most 
striking of the play. Her mother consoles her, 
speaks of heaven in tender and lofty imagery, 
and hints at her suffering while alive, and just 
grazes the subject of Hannele's birth. Her 
suspected father is the examining magistrate 
Berger, but the idea is lightly dwelt upon — suf- 
ficiently, however, to give us a glimmer of the 
truth and adding a deeper accent to the gloom. 
Hannele's mother was hounded to her death as 
was this child. Her body, as we know by the 
testimony of the wood-cutter, Seidel, was a mass 
of bruises after death. The interview between 
mother and daughter is solemn and yet piteously 
human. The poor child cries aloud after the 
fading figure and later shows with joy to Sister 
Martha the supposed flower, Golden Sesame, 
which her mother gave her. Then this tiny 
waif of the gutter becomes light-headed and 
sings of flowers, of her teacher, and of the 
angels she has seen. From this delirious 
state she never recovers, and her dreams take 
196 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

on a darker tinge in the second part of the 
play. 

A great dark angel appears and remains dumb 
to the child's excited questionings. Her visions 
become involved here, for the Deaconess is also 
seen, and while she is habited as Sister Martha, 
her features are those of Hannele's mother. 
The child notices this and remarks upon it. 
And now a touch of Hoffmannish fantasy is 
given in the appearance of the village tailor, 
who salutes her as the Princess Hannele, and 
delights her by producing a shining robe and a 
pair of small slippers. Although she knows 
she is preparing for her death-bed, she is de- 
lighted. Her conversation with the Deaconess 
has taught her that death is not to be avoided 
— that it is the gate to joys eternal. There is 
something subtly sad in this child eagerly ask- 
ing about death and the hereafter, with the 
awful symbol of death sitting in grim silence 
before her. Hauptmann has deeply probed the 
childish heart. The fantastic tailor retires after 
deferentially saluting Death, and then some 
children, headed by Gottwald, enter and beg 
Hannele's pardon for calling her Princess Rag- 
tag. Gottwald is bidding her farewell when a 
lot of the village people appear, and later the 
crystal coffin into which Hannele is laid. There 
is nothing repulsive in all this, despite its real- 
ism. Hauptmann's art is so far removed from 
the crude that sequence follows sequence in the 
most natural fashion and just as in De Quincey's 
Dream Fugue. 197 



ICONOCLASTS 

Then comes the most dramatic part of these 
visions. Mattern slouches in and begins to 
curse Hannele, and to search for her in the 
dark corners. The neighbours cluster about 
the coffin, hiding it from view. The stranger 
enters and calls Mattern to account. There is 
a scene between the two. Mattern denies hav- 
ing treated the child badly, and thunder and 
lightning rebuke him for the lie. He perjures 
himself, and the mystic flower glows with mi- 
raculous light on Hannele's breast. The neigh- 
bours, who play the part of Greek chorus, 
fiercely cry, " Murderer ! murderer ! " and as 
one pursued by the Furies the miserable wretch 
rushes away to hang himself. The stranger 
assumes a supernatural appearance. He be- 
comes clothed in white, and his brow shines. 
He advances to the crystal basket wherein lies 
Hannele, and bids her arise. She does so, and 
the neighbours flee affrighted. Remember that 
all this occurs within the darkened chambers of 
Hannele's sick brain. Its objectivity, so far 
as we are concerned, is a device of the drama- 
tist. Hannele arises and 'goes to the stranger, 
who is a glorified image of her teacher, Gott- 
wald. Some lyrical passages, strongly tinged 
with Oriental colouring, follow, and an apotheo- 
sis closes the scene. 

After all this burst of colour and harmony, for 

there is much music of harps and plucked 

strings, we are almost instantly transported to 

the almshouse again, and see Hannele once 

19S 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

more in her rags on her squalid bed. The 
doctor gravely announces, " She is dead," and 
Sister Martha ends the play by saying, " She is 
in heaven." 

Now make of Hannele what you will. Con- 
sider it as a plea against cruelty to children, as 
a strong pictorial proverb, anything. There is 
symbolism lurking in its situations. The Christ- 
idea of pity, an idea new to the pagan world, 
but not new to Buddhism, may be considered as 
the key-note of Hannele. Religious it is not. 
Blasphemous, however, in intention it is not, 
and one fails to see any similarity between it 
and Jean Beraud's picture of a Christ attired 
in nineteenth-century garb and with a modern 
Magdalen washing his feet. 

Hauptmann may tread on remarkably deli- 
cate ground at times ; but his seriousness and 
artistic ingenuity have enabled him to produce 
a most poetic analysis of a soul and give it 
dramatic rhythms. To have the courage to give 
permanent shape to such a fantastic dream 
requires, besides imagination, marked technical 
abilities. 

To me Hannele seems like a huge chant to 
the glory of death. Death, " whose truer name 
is Onward," as sang the poet, is the theme, and 
Death is shown to be Lord and Master. Like 
Maeterlinck, Hauptmann tries to give emotion 
in the mass. You remember in LTntruse and 
Les Aveugles, how everything is subordinated to 
the production of the one thrill — that of fear. 
199 



ICONOCLASTS 

By dissimilar method Hauptmann gets a similat 
result. He meets death with a grave sweetness. 
At first terrible as is the figure of the great 
Dark Angel, with his dread sword all bathed 
in greenish light, the Deaconess brings balm 
to the anxious, questioning soul of the child, and 
she meets death with dignity and submission. 
With some of the same gentle and elevated 
philosophy does Hauptmann approach his 
theme. The beggar child and her sufferings 
and dreams serve for him as something which 
he drapes about with wisdom and poetry. 

It is a reversion to the old miracle play cun- 
ningly blended with modern realism ; it is this 
that makes its form seemingly amorphous, and 
renders it both a challenge and stumbling-block 
to the critics. From the old view-point such 
a play as this is not fit for the boards. It lacks 
action, and deals with states of emotion rather 
than with dramatic events. But a soul life can 
also be dramatic, and Hauptmann, who knows 
Parsifal well, has retained an admixture of 
realism so as to set off by violent contrast the 
exalted idealism of the later scenes. 

Jules Lemaitre, the French critic, in praising 
Hannele, spoke of the persistency in us of 
early religious impressions, no matter how 
blurred they become by contact with the world. 
Oddly enough, this mixture of the real and the 
supernatural forestalled Gorky and his slum 
plays. Gorky himself could not have con- 
ceived and executed anything more poignant 
20n 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

than the story of Hannele — " Petite soeur de 
la grande Brunnhild endormie aux rochers 
deserts," as Gabriel Trarieux calls her. A 
dream poem, a study in mysticism, Hannele 
evokes memories of Maeterlinck, though it 
" lacks the unity of his atmosphere," as an Eng- 
lish critic has rightly said. But it is moving 
art, nevertheless. 

Hauptmann wears all the earmarks of a 
genius. He is child of his age to a dangerous 
degree, and his tremulous, vibrating sensibility 
mirrored the hysterical agitation, the pessimism, 
the sad strivings, the individualism, the fret-fire 
fomentings and unbelief of a dying century. 
He knows Goethe, and after the last act of The 
Sunken Bell one feels constrained to cry, 
"The third part of Faust!" But it is not 
Faust, neither is it Tannhauser, though there 
are analogies ; it is realism, it is idealism, it is 
pantheism, it is Wagnerism. Above all Fried- 
rich Nietzsche towers in the background, and 
there is poesy, exquisite poesy. 
/ The Sunken Bell is a compound of antag- 
onistic elements. The unities seem askew, yet 
the result is artistic and illusory. Hauptmann 
has a clairvoyant quality ; he imposes upon his 
audience his dream of his own fantastic world, 
and you find yourself five minutes after the 
rise of the curtain devoutly believing in this 
queer No-man's land of mischievous water 
goblins, satyrs, wonderful white nymphs, and 
sorrowful mortals. It is all a masque — a pro- 
201 



ICONOCLASTS 

found masque of the spirit in labour. Viewed as 
a symbol, we see in Heinrich the bell-founder, 
the type of the struggling, the aspiring artist, 
who, cast down by defeat, is led to more remote 
and loftier heights by a new ideal, there to live 
the life of the Uebermensch, the Super-man, 
of Nietzsche. The fall is inevitable. Dare as 
dared Faust and Ibsen's Brand to desert the 
valleys and scale the slopes of Parnassus, and 
man's fate is assured. 

Hauptmann's hero is a bell-founder who, 
crazed by grief at the loss of his bell in the lake, 
mounts the peak and lies dying at the door of a 
witch. It is at a period so charmingly pictured 
by Heine. The twilight of the gods has begun 
and the scared peasant caught flashes of faun- 
like creatures flitting in woodland glade and 
grove, still saw shining the breasts of the nymph 
in the brake, and piously crossed himself when 
toad, snake, and worm crossed his path. Hein- 
rich is found by Rautendelein, an elfish being, 
an exquisite creation of fire, of flame, something 
of Ariel, Miranda, Puck, naive Gretchen, a new 
Undine, jl symbol of the freedom of nature, a 
creature touched with the vaguer surmise of 
adolescence, the most poetically conceived since 
Goethe's, and yet evocative of Hans Christian 
Andersen. She, like the mermaid of Ander- 
sen, loves the unconscious mortal, and despite 
the jaundiced warnings of an old spirit of the 
well, she follows the sick man back to his abode. 
The first act is ably contrived. There is atmos- 

202 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

phere, and the well-nigh impossible parts of the 
faun and the frog man — the latter indulges in 
the familiar Brek-ke-ke-keks of Aristophanes — 
become real for the moment. It is the Haupt- 
mann spell that weighs upon our senses. <. An- 
dersen-like, too, is the discovery by this child 
fairy that love means pain. She finds a tear in 
her eye and thinks it is dew. The mystery of 
womanhood encompasses her. 

In Act II the bellman is upon a bed of delirium. 
He has been found and brought down from the 
mountains by his friends, the priest and the 
villagers. His wife and children try to comfort 
him, but he is oblivious, for he sees in his ex- 
cited trance the figure of a beautiful girl. Sud- 
denly the dream becomes real. Rautendelein 
sits at his side and woos him back to health. 
Startling is the end of this scene. The nymph 
stands against the wall, her eyes fairly blazing 
at Heinrich, while his wife crouches at his feet, 
happy at his restoration to sanity. She does 
not see his glance fondly fastened on the nymph 
of the forest. 

He then leaves his home and goes up to the 
heights, where, unhampered, he may exercise the 
full play of his artistic faculties. He will make 
a bell and tune it to the laughter of Rautende- 
lein. It shall make silvery music across the 
hills and valleys, and summon the stray souls of 
earth to him. He exalts nature to the priest 
who follows him to reclaim his soul ; this third 
act is really a glorified burst of Nietzscheism. 
203 



ICONOCLASTS 

Then he has bad dreams ; he is haunted by 
visions of home, and, after all the splendour of 
imagery, of his defiance of the conventionalities 
of life, something mars his life with the perfect 
woman he has elected to follow. 

Appear his two children carrying an urn. 
" What carry ye ? " he demands. " Father, we 
carry an urn." — " What is in the urn ? " 
" Father, something bitter." — " What is the 
something bitter ? " " Father, our mother's 
tears." — "Where is your mother?" "Where 
the water-lilies grow." 

Then booms down in the valley, where lies 
the lake, the sound of a bell; an unearthly 
tone it has, as if struck by no mortal hand; 
it is touched by the hand of his dead wife 
who killed herself to escape her misery. Re- 
morse sets in. He is no longer Balder the god 
of Spring, but a wretched man, and, driving 
away with revilings the poor Rautendelein, 
he descends to the valley, but is driven away, 
and finally dies in front of the witch's hut; but 
not before Rautendelein finds him. His last 
words are an ecstatic appeal to the sun — the 
sun which is the symbol of his striving. 

The charm, the witchery, the magical bitter- 
sweetness of this dramatic poem are formidable 
at the close. Heinrich dies of poison, self-ad- 
ministered, while through his filmy eyes there 
presses the vision of the beloved one. It is, 
indeed, Rautendelein, but her very shadow. 
Deserted, dreary, neither maid nor mortal nor 
204 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

nymph, she accepts the love of the hideous, 
frog-like Nickelman, and goes down to his slimy 
couch in the well. She emerges only to see 
her lover dying, and pathetically denies to him 
that she is Rautendelein. As the curtain falls 
on his corpse, we catch a glimpse of the girl 
sadly returning to the well and to her horrible 
mate in the mud. ^. 

Sorma gave a delicious, na'fve, and plastic ver- 
sion of the nymph at the Irving Place Theatre 
in 1897. She possesses an exquisite sensibility. 
She painted with a light hand the caprice, elfish 
cunning, and wiles of Rautendelein, and at the 
close the tragic note was delicately sounded. 
It was a great, a notable achievement. 

Sorma has been called the German Duse. 
She is really a Silesian by birth, and she is not a 
Duse. But she has unusual adroitness in the 
expression of the conventional dramatic symbol- 
ism, and an agility in technic and a variety of 
vocal and facial expression that enable her to 
assume a wide range of character. A certain 
briskness and imperious piquancy make her 
work unlike that of the German stage. She is 
more Gallic, in reality more Slavic than Gallic. 
Her person is finely fashioned, her features 
good, her eyes particularly expressive, and her 
mask mobile and expressive easily of a mob 
of elusive emotions. She reaches her climax 
by a rational crescendo, and never fails to 
thrill. Altogether a creature of real fire and 
with an air of distinction. Of the occasional 
205 



ICONOCLASTS 

sentimentality of the German stage she is nevei 
guilty. 

Mr. Meltzer in the preface of his admirable 
translation tells us " to view the play from the 
standpoint of the reformer, and you may inter- 
pret it as the tale of a dreamer, who, hampered 
by inevitable conditions, strives to remodel human 
society. For my part I incline to regard Hein- 
rich the bell-founder as a symbol of Humanity 
struggling painfully toward the realization of its 
dream of the ideal truth and joy and light and 
justice. Rautendelein in this reading stands for 
Nature, or rather for the freedom and sincerity 
of Nature, missing a reunion with which Hu- 
manity can never hope to reach the supreme 
truth, and the supreme bliss of which the Sun is 
the emblem." 

The artist sans moral obligations is bound to 
be a failure, no matter the height or depth of 
his genius. This has Tennyson sung; and 
Goethe, in his imperial manner, has set it forth. 
Symbolic and allegoric The Sunken Bell may 
signify the conflict of Pagan and Christian, Jew 
and Greek, Heinrich standing midway between 
the opposing forces as did Walter Pater's Denys 
in the mad days at Auxerrois. Miraculously 
has the poet fixed his wild people of wood and 
waves. They with their coarse, elemental ges- 
tures and foolery might have stepped out of a 
canvas by Arnold Bocklin. The blank verse is 
admirable, and while the Faust metre is largely 
used there are no such lyrics as we find strewn 
206 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

through Goethe's immortal pages. And yet — 
yet is not Hauptmann Germany's most distin- 
guished dramatist since that master ? The 
admirers of Robert Hamerling and Von Wilden- 
bruch will not have it so — possibly because of 
the pessimism and the socialistic views of the 
new man. Nevertheless, Hauptmann has the 
ear of all Germany to-day. 

In Rose Bernd, Hauptmann returns to his 
beloved Silesians of The Weavers, of Fuhrmann 
Henschel, of Before Sunrise. His new five-act 
piece is a drama of the open fields and rough 
peasant life. It is atmospheric throughout. Its 
moral fibre is incontestably strong, though the 
method of presentation may seem unpleasant. 
The dialect is difficult for the student, the play 
itself squalid and painful to a degree. Nor has 
it the inevitable quality of Die Weber or Wag- 
oner Henschel. Rose recalls, though vaguely, 
something of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, of Hetty 
Sorrel, and of Gretchen. She is a worker in the 
harvest fields, and previous to the action of the 
play has been deceived by Christoph Flamm, 
the mayor of the district and a jolly landowner 
who has a paralyzed wife. He is a vital figure ; 
his exuberance, unrepentance, selfishness, and 
genuine passion for Rose are all minutely indi- 
cated. His wife has been a second mother to 
Rose, who resides with her father, a poor old 
peasant, a strict pietist. Frau Flamm has lost 
her only child and lives on her memories. She 
is wheeled about her house in an invalid's chair, 
207 



ICONOCLASTS 

She, too, is alive, and her not unkindly probing 
of the unfortunate girl's secret brings about some 
stirring scenes. 

Rose is engaged to a young man, a book- 
binder, who is pious, whose dream was to be- 
come a missionary. He is unassuming, ugly, 
and adores Rose. She might have surmounted 
her troubles if the disturbing element in the 
person of Streckmann, the dissipated engineer of 
the village threshing machine, had not crossed 
her fate. He has witnessed the interviews of 
Rose and Flamm, and he scares her by threaten- 
ing to tell the story to her father and her be* 
trothed. He attempts to capture her for himself, 
and at last succeeds, as the wretched girl relates 
in accusing him : " I came to you in terror and 
anguish. I got on my knees before you. You 
swore that you would keep my secret. You fell 
upon me like a bird of prey. I tried to escape 
. . . you committed a crime." 

Streckmann later, in drunken fury, tells the 
peasants of Rose's sins. Her father believes in 
her, but insists upon an explanation. The mis- 
erable creature confesses in a delirious accent 
that she has just strangled her new-born babe. 
Her father has her arrested, and her patient 
lover August, who has forgiven her, lifts the 
swooning girl and exclaims, " Hat das madel 
gelitten ! " (What the girl must have suffered !) 
The play was forbidden the boards in Austria by 
the Emperor — it was at once too moral and too 
truthful. 

208 



GERHART HAUPTMANN 

The interpretation at the Lessing Theatre, 
Berlin, which I witnessed, October 2, 1904, 
was one the memory of which I shall long 
treasure. The distribution of the rdles was al- 
most faultless ; the individual execution of a high \ 
order. Rose was enacted by that great artist, f 
Else Lehmann, who portrayed the trying soul " 
states and mental agony of the unfortunate 
peasant girl with supreme skill. All the more 
difficult is the character because Hauptmann has 
resolutely avoided showing us what Rose really 
thinks. She is reacted upon by her friends and 
enemies, yet seldom speaks, except in mono- 
syllables. The illumination of her nature was 
a peculiar triumph of Lehmann's simple, sin- 
cere art. 

Next to her artistically stood Hedwig Pauly 
as the invalid wife who knows the manner of 
man to whom she is united and divines through 
feminine intuition and sympathy the sufferings 
of Rose. The scene wherein the girl is inter- 
rogated was tear-compelling. Nor must the 
open-air incidents be forgotten. Herr Brahm's 
company played throughout with that fidelity 
to life, with that utter absence of " acting," which 
are the very essence of the histrionic art. 

Rose Bernd, one is tempted to add, is Haupt- 
mann's masterpiece, if we did not remember 
Die Weber. It is deeply human, and in its 
exposition of character a masterpiece. 

It seems Hauptmann's fate to be hopelessly 
misinterpreted — he, the poet whose love for his 
20Q 



ICONOCLASTS 

fellow-beings is become a veritable passion. He 
began his artistic life as a poet-sculptor, and he 
has been modelling human souls ever since. 
Perhaps they may be as imperishable as if 
they had been carved in marble. 



210 






v 

PAUL HERVIEU 

When Ferdinand Brunetiere praises a drama, 
novel, or poem, it may be inferred that the ethical 
element predominates. It is, therefore, some- 
thing of a surprise to find him enthusiastic over 
Paul Hervieu's latest play, Le Dedale, which 
met with such a friendly reception at the Theatre 
Frangais, December 19, 1903, the night of its 
production. It is a work of power, of art, 
while its moral is not flaunted as on a signboard. 
The implacably harsh and logical treatment of 
the woman with two husbands doubtless extorted 
from M. Brunetiere the honour of a patient and 
lengthy review. Himself a Roman Catholic of 
the reactionary — one is tempted to employ the 
old-fashioned word " ultramontane " — type, the 
French critic could not fail to side with the play- 
wright, though he has not hesitated, after the 
manner of critics, to read into this problem 
piece some meanings of his own. 

With the advent of the Naquet divorce bill 
in France the countenance of problem plays 
underwent a radical change. A ministerial 
stroke of the pen invalidated Dumas fils and his 
unhappy women as a theme for dramatic treat- 
2H 



ICONOCLASTS 

ment. We have had plays dealing with the un 
pleasant subject since then, but these were either 
frankly frivolous like those of Alfred Capus, 01 
wittily cynical with those of Maurice Donnay. 
The modern master builder of French drama, 
Henry Becque, wrote L'Enlevement, in which 
he presented the question with his accustomed 
clearness and probity. Hervieu, in Le Dedale, 
shows the influence of at least one scene of 
Becque, though he has handled the incident 
so individually as to deflect its conclusions com- 
pletely. Since L'Enlevement there has been 
no such literary performance as Le Dedale, 
which proved a labyrinth indeed for its un, 
happy characters and a masterpiece in form. 

The story is a simple one, direct as antique 
tragedy, and far from being improbable. Di- 
vorce in France is a much more complicated 
matter than in America. Society, notwithstand- 
ing its cynical attitude, is not too favourable to 
divorced men and women, particularly women. 
The church refuses to sanction separation if it is 
to be followed by remarriage. Whether forged 
in heaven or elsewhere, the fetters of wedlock 
are never to be loosed unless by death. Now 
Hervieu does not pretend to a sympathy with 
either society or the church. He does not at- 
tempt to win our suffrages for the woman or for 
the man. His is too judicial an intellect to show 
partisanship, and he is too superior an artist to 
turn his play into a moral tract. He dives deeper 
than the law or society ; he dives straight into 

212 



PAUL HERVIEU 

the human heart, and after setting forth his 
situations his summing up is irrefragable. From 
the clash of his warring souls comes his tragedy ; 
the divorce is a mere pretext to set his people in 
action. The law of the species, that compelling 
and terrible law, is his weapon, a formidable one 
in his skilled hands. His thesis, baldly stated, is 
this : A man and a woman once married are 
married until death, if there be a child. Let 
the law supervene, let vagrant passion demolish 
the social structure, this stark, naked fact re- 
mains — the flesh of the child unites the parents 
in the bond of eternity. 

In an earlier play, Les Tenailles, the same 
idea was present, but is a first attempt compared 
to this newer work. The story in Le Dedale 
runs thus : Marianne de Pogis has separated 
from her husband Max, a handsome, careless 
viveur, for very patent reasons ; with her own 
eyes she witnessed his infidelity, further accen- 
tuated by the fact that her friend was an accom- 
plice to his infidelity. The outraged woman 
takes her son and seeks the protection of her 
parents. These are called the Villard-Duvals, 
the father of the old school, tolerant of mascu- 
line transgressions ; the mother a strict Roman 
Catholic, who abhors divorce. M. Hervieu has 
never been so happy in his painting of two such 
widely dissimilar portraits. Marianne is a proud 
woman with her father's will and temperament, 
proud and, unfortunately for her peace of mind, 
passionate. The inevitable man turns up. He 
213 



ICONOCLASTS 

is an admirable character, this Le Breuil — a 
gentleman, steadfast, honourable above all, 
patient. He loves Marianne and will not be 
refused. And she, tired of her claustral ex- 
istence, tired of her mother's reproaches, at last 
listens to the pleadings of her suitor. Why not ? 
She argues that her life has been made miserable 
through no fault of her own. Why not re- 
marry and snatch some happiness from the 
devourer of all happiness — Time ? Her 
mother refuses to hear of the project. Worse 
to her would be the remarriage of her daughter 
than sheer adultery. She has accused Marianne 
of an unforgiving disposition, and it is only too 
plain that she still considers her married to her 
divorced husband. But the father likes his pre- 
sumptive son-in-law. The man's honesty and 
fearlessness appeal to him. Marianne, worn 
out by the continual bickering, marries Guil- 
laume Le Breuil. 

In the next act we find them happy. The 
little son is loved by his stepfather as if he were 
his own. But a cloud mounts in their sky. 
The former husband, Max de Pogis, comes with 
his mother to intercede for a sight of his boy. 
He is melancholy and depressingly repentant. 
He married the woman for whom he sold his 
matrimonial birthright, and is now a widower. 
In a vividly conceived and expressed scene his 
mother, a skilful, worldly dame, argues with 
Marianne that to the father the love of the son 
belongs. At last, after an exhausting interview 
214 



PAUL HERVIEU 

in which the hearts of these three humans are 
shown as if in a blazing light, Marianne consents 
to her son visiting the chateau of his father and 
his grandmother. 

And then begins the mischief. The boy is 
smitten by a dangerous illness. The third act 
discovers Marianne almost crazed by grief at 
the home of her former husband. She has 
nursed the child in company with his father. 
She only leaves the bedside when the doctor 
pronounces his patient out of danger. The 
woman collapses. Max finds her weak, her 
nerves shattered by the strain. He has touched 
her hand across the body of their dying child, 
but not her heart. He makes an impassioned 
appeal, but is repulsed. She loves her new 
husband, she says, and has written him at least 
once every day. The mother of Max also tells 
the harassed woman of the love she has aroused 
in her son — a love purified by deep sorrow. 
At last Marianne retires to the apartment in 
which she slept the night when Max de Pogis 
brought her to his chateau. Max enters. It is 
a scene that even when read touches the heart. 
The man is in earnest He is humble. He tells 
of his love — a love compared to which the 
second husband's is nothing. He plays the old 
variations with a woman's heart — a maternal 
heart — as the instrument. This music proves 
dangerous. It sets reverberating familiar chords. 
The hour is midnight. The father of her son 
looks into her eyes and points to the mementos 
215 



ICONOCLASTS 

of their early love. He clasps her to his breast, 
and the curtain falls on the subjugation of the 
woman. The ghost of the past has made her 
forget the present. 

Do not be in haste to condemn her weakness. 
The dramatist is pitiless enough in his judgment 
She goes to her parents', not her husband's 
home, and half mad with remorse tells — with- 
out any attempt to sentimentally varnish her guilt 
— her mother everything. That lady is not 
surprised, shocked as she may be. Max, after 
all, is the husband of Marianne in the sight of 
God, let legislators decree what they may. It 
is the triumph of the mother, the triumph of the 
species Jules Gaultier would call it. The father 
is told, and he grieves mightily. And Le Breuil, 
the new husband, what of him ! Shuddering, 
Marianne declares that henceforth for her he 
no longer exists. She has descended lower 
than the lowest, but there remains a still deeper 
gulf of vileness, and into it she will not fall. Le 
Breuil clamours for admittance. He must know 
why his wife has not gone to her house. She 
will not see him. He, the gentle Guillaume, 
becomes quarrelsome. Then she resolves to 
meet him. This interview is another master- 
piece of observation and dramatic values. He 
begs for an explanation — he suspects that her 
nerves have been upset by her visit and by the 
illness of her son, though he is too tender and 
chivalric to cast this in her teeth. He is an- 
gelic in his behaviour, but to no avail. Some 
216 



PAUL HERVIEU 

subtle chemistry has transformed the nature of 
Marianne. She respects, she pities her husband 
— live with him she cannot. Aroused by her 
obduracy, Guillaume rushes at her to kiss her. 
In a blinding flash she sees herself further dis- 
honoured — and to avoid the shame and desola- 
tion of it all she confesses. It is an awful 
revelation. The unhappy man cannot believe 
his ears. He is brutal, hysterical, wretched 
and finally in a fury throws the woman from 
him and rushes out to kill the wrecker of his 
happiness. 

Fifth acts are always dangerous. Ibsen's 
fifth acts are, as a rule, his weakest. The play- 
wright who has the genius of the first act has 
6eldom the genius of the fifth. M. Hervieu's 
first acts invariably puzzle or offend. No writer 
has to create a new public with each new play 
as has this one. The reason is because his 
themes and their bold, unconventional manipu- 
lation set on edge the nerves of his audience. 

In his drama, Hervieu is the great serious 
artist. He never trifles, despite his gift of irony, 
with his characters ; never mocks them — above 
all, never lets them escape his iron grasp. 
There is nothing of the improvisatore in him ; he 
has not the romantic passion of George Sand nor 
Ibsen's spirit of revolt ; nor is he a vindicator of 
social wrongs like M. Brieux. He is a dramatist, 
perhaps, fathered by the unique Henry Becque, 
with a vision not unlike Stendhal's. The in- 
tensity of this vision, the sincerity of the man. 
217 



ICONOCLASTS 

and the utter absence in him of the the- 
atrical wonder-worker have endeared him to 
M. Brunetiere. 

Every big play has at least one act that 
evokes violent discussion. Le Dedale is no 
exception. Its fifth act is a strain upon our 
credulity, though sober second thought compels 
one to accept the denouement, violent as it is. 
A duel is inevitable between the two men ; the 
death of either one would be banal ; Marianne 
cannot without violating the proprieties be 
thrust into the arms of either man ; besides, the 
woman, horrified by her error, an error seem- 
ingly thrust upon her by malignant fate, has now 
conceived an aversion to both Max and Guil- 
laume. Max persecutes her, follows her to her 
country home, while Guillaume silently tracks 
him. She meets the latter in an arbour and 
refuses to live with him again. The injured 
man encounters Max as that seducer gayly pro- 
ceeds through the garden. Their meeting is 
a stirring moment. After a few bitter words 
Guillaume drags Max over a cliff into a raging 
stream, where their bodies are swept irrecovera- 
bly away. Unconscious of this double tragedy, 
Marianne is heard calling : " Louis, Louis ! " 
and as the little boy runs in the curtain falls on 
a mute, touching display of maternal love. 

The reading of the play gives the impression 

of a melodramatic touch in this catastrophe. It 

seems at first as if the author in despair had 

solved his problem by a hasty theatrical stroke 

218 



PAUL HERVIEU 

As performed by the inimitable Bartet and 
Le Bargy and Paul Mounet there is only a faint 
suggestion of the theatric. Like the divorce 
theme, the tragedy at the close is but an 
aid to expand M. Hervieu's thesis. Not the 
inviolability of ecclesiastical marriage, not the 
dispute of two men for the possession of a 
woman, but his thesis is the exposition of the 
truth that a man and a woman are forever 
linked by that bond of flesh, their child. Other- 
wise the dramatist holds no brief for heredity or 
one against divorce. He selected his material 
like an artist. What would have been the re- 
sult if Marianne had had a child by her second 
husband ? Probably we should have had no 
play. We must accept the premises of Hervieu 
or else avoid challenging his conclusions. In 
the remotest analysis a drama may be an entity 
for the crucible of the metaphysician ; yet if it 
be great it will defy the test of logic as does life 
itself. And there is not only logic in Paul 
Hervieu's Le D6dale, but life, a great section of 
throbbing, real life. It is certainly the most 
significant French play thus far of the new 
century. 

I tested the validity of the foregoing criticism 
written after reading the play by attending a 
performance at the Frangais, Paris, October 20, 
1904. Madame Bartet was superb, far exceed- 
ing my rather suspicious expectations. Her 
serenity and dignity in the earlier acts ; the 
219 



ICONOCLASTS 

maternal anguish, the maternal — literally — pas. 
sion that caused her defection ; the remorse and 
almost hysterical confession, were all indicated 
by this mistress of fine nuances. Le Bargy has 
seldom been better cast, while Paul Mounet was 
excellent ; and I was almost convinced by the 
finale, though I wish the playwright, taking a 
hint from Ibsen, had ended on an unresolved 
cadence. But M. Hervieu is too logical, too 
Gallic, to treat his audiences thus. He even 
re-wrote The Enigma so as to make the end 
clearer. 

The Enigma, which London saw in March, 
1902, at Wyndham's Theatre, was then called 
Caesar's Wife, which is, as Osman Edwards 
justly remarks, a pompous title. 

The English cast of L'Enigme was : Mrs. 
Tree as L6onore, Fay Davis as Giselle, Fred 
Kerr as Marquis de Neste, Leonard Boyne as 
'Vivarce. The story is simple, the treatment 
rather classic : Act I is lengthy, barren of in- 
cident, and bitter in its polemical tone ; Act II 
is old-fashioned in its development and climax, 
yet the last words spoken are distinctly novel 
and a tremendous indictment of the man who 
slays the woman on the plea of outraged honour. 
Here is Dumas's Tu^-ld reversed with a ven- 
geance. Yet one platitude supplants another. If 
the brute who kills his wife because she is un- 
faithful to him is to be succeeded by the lady 
who deceives her husband because he is un- 
pleasant to her, where does the moral come 
220 



PAUL HERVIEU 

in ? It is a new convention driving out an 
old. As Hervieu is feministe, his sympathy 
leads him to espouse the cause of the woman. 
Without wishing to be ungallant, we may ask 
what is the difference between the woman with 
a half-dozen lovers and the man with a half- 
dozen mistresses? In the eyes of the law, in 
the eyes of religion, none ; in the eyes of so- 
ciety a vast deal — if the woman is discovered. 
Not if the man is ; but before a jury-box com- 
posed of twelve intelligent men the woman who 

— as popular parlance has it — " sins " has every 
chance of being pitied and pardoned. Here the 
elemental sympathy of the male for the female 
counts heavily against testimony and judge's 
charge. 

Dumas knew this (if he had lived in America 
the fact would have been driven home every 
morning in the newspapers) when he wrote 
Francillon, especially when he wrote Femme de 
Claude. Tue-la! was his ferocious advice. So 
M. Hervieu set himself to preach the contrary. 
In Les Paroles Restent, his first dramatic essay, 
even in Les Tenailles, and La Loi de 1' Homme, 
the wordiness becomes most monotonous. In 
The Enigma, we notice the same long-winded 
discussions a la Dumas as in Princesse Georges, 
with the raissonneur in the centre of the stage, 

— in this case Marquis de Neste, — weighing 
the merits of the various speeches, spouting 
many himself, altogether turning the exposi- 
tory act into a debating society. In their 

221 



ICONOCLASTS 

revolt against the so-called "well-made play," 
the newer Parisian dramatists have gone to the 
other extreme. 

However, the plot of The Enigma is distinctly 
worth the telling. Two brothers, noblemen, De 
Gourgiran by name, are married to two charming 
women, Leonore and Giselle. Here is a quartet 
instead of the eternal duo with the triangle hung 
over the door like a sinister horseshoe presaging 
ill luck. To this double family are added the 
elderly Marquis, who is a cousin to the brothers, 
and a young man, Vivarce by name. He is the 
unknown quantity of this well-mixed combina- 
tion. At first the household seems like most 
happy ones — without anything worthy of chroni- 
cling. The brothers are mighty Nimrods, the 
wives have children to interest them, Vivarce 
to amuse them, the Marquis to lecture them. 
Everything goes on oiled wheels until the game- 
keeper of the estate tells his masters that poach- 
ers are abroad. The fraternal pair resolve on 
stealing out before daybreak and surprising the 
rascals. The respective characters of the broth- 
ers do not show much diversity ; both live to hunt, 
and incidentally they love their wives better, much 
better, than their dogs. About this there must 
be no mistake. Honest, upright, inflexible, hard- 
hearted, hard-headed persons, they are absolutely 
lacking in humour. They bore their wives, and 
if you would tell them this, they would shrug 
shoulders philosophically and remark that women, 
especially good wives, were intended to be bore d 
by husbands. 222 



PAUL HERVIEU 

But note their scowling features if that draw^ 
ing-room animal, the professional lover, is men- 
tioned! Both empty their choicest vials of 
objurgation and fury upon the luckless beast's 
head. In fact, a discussion is started about the 
treatment a man should accord an erring wife. 
The one rather would shoot such a wife through 
the heart, the other brother would slay the lover 
and keep the wife alive and near at hand so that 
she might be tortured. This cold-blooded propo- 
sition arouses the righteous indignation of Giselle, 
who protests in the name of her sex, in the name 
of humanity. She becomes so agitated that the 
Marquis, whose suspicions have been aroused 
for some time, suspects the lady of carrying on 
an intrigue with Vivarce. Earlier in the scene 
he has privately accused Vivarce of betraying 
one of his hosts' wives, but which one he cannot 
say. 

Now here is where the puzzle comes in and 
the psychology evaporates. The Marquis, so he 
relates, while suffering from insomnia, gets up 
one fine night and sees Vivarce vanishing in the 
door of the chateau, which door was opened by 
a female hand. Whose ? Evidently one of the 
married women. Which one ? Ah, that is the 
enigma! Vivarce feebly admits his shameful 
behaviour, though he refuses to give the name 
of the fair sinner. The old nobleman is per^ 
plexed. He advises flight. He talks like an 
ancient uncle from the country, who does not 
wish to borrow money from his city relatives 



ICONOCLASTS 

*— that is, he talks sense, and as it dribbles in 
one ear and out the other of his moonstruck 
companion, he realizes the futility of his well- 
meant sermon. Young men will be fools and 
lunatics — and he might have added, when they 
are not, heaven help their wives in later years ! 

Unknown to the others the brothers resolve 
on lying in wait for the poachers. After some 
conjugal bantering they retire. Their wives sit 
up to talk matters over. The door has been 
barred ; it is very close within ; Giselle pro- 
poses that they open the house. She essays 
in vain to lift the heavy oaken bar. Leonore 
tries. She succeeds. The moonlight is mellow 
without, and the summer night sends pleasant air 
and odours into the living room. At last the two 
women prepare for bed. Novels are selected, 
and with lamps in hand they are leaving the 
room without thought of the open door. Giselle 
remembers it and returns. Leonore bids her not 
to bother — there are no thieves in the neigh- 
bourhood. The curtain falls. 

Up to this moment there is no way of rec- 
ognizing the " guilty " woman. Dishonours are 
about even. Giselle, to be sure, is passionate in 
her protestations of contempt for the brutality 
of husbands who take the law into their own 
hands. But Leonore unbars the door. Giselle 
recalls the fact that it should not be open, and 
Leonore tells her not to worry. Which one is 
it ? And before you rush rashly to a conclusion 
remember that the dramatist knows more than his 
224 



PAUL HERVIEU 

audience, and that he contrives pitfalls for the 
unwary. Both women seem guilty, both may be 
innocent. One of the brothers comes softly into 
the room ; both have agreed not to worry their 
wives about the poachers. The door is found 
unbolted. The first comer surmises that his 
brother has preceded him, but the gamekeeper 
tells him the door was open. Then the other 
brother enters. Surprise ! But there is no time 
for this sentiment, as a man steals through the 
dimly lighted room. After a brief, fierce strug- 
gle he is pinioned. A lantern reveals the fea- 
tures of Vivarce. How did he come there ? Why 
did he come out of the women's apartments at 
this hour in the morning ? Hate and destruction 
are in the air. 

His answers are evasive. He is nervous — 
wanted a cigarette. The lie is cast back in his 
teeth. And then a woman, holding a candle, 
rushes in with pale face. It is Leonore. She 
has been awakened, so she avers, by the shock 
of voices. Her husband sternly inquires her 
whereabouts a few moments before. She has 
an excuse ready. She swears she is not guilty, 
and even kneels to Vivarce, beseeching him to 
clear her. It is too much. Her husband plucks 
her by the arm, and then, as his brother ques- 
tions her too closely, the man wavers to the side 
of his wife. Perhaps, after all, it was Giselle. 
Yes, where is Giselle ? The husband of the ab- 
sent one is swift to defend her. He goes to 
her room and finds her fast asleep. Aha ! says 
225 



ICONOCLASTS 

the other woman, and awakens her. Confused 
by the lights, the accusation, the clash of words, 
she is the very picture of a guilty woman as she 
enters in her white night robe, her hair unbound, 
her features suffused in tears. Besides, did she 
npt make some very audacious speeches earlier 
in the evening defending the right to love of a 
woman wearied of her husband ? Free love — 
ah, odious phrase ! It damns her at once. 

The trouble with a situation of this kind is 
that the spectator, carried away by his curiosity, 
forgets all about the play of character, the prob- 
lem involved. It is The Lady or the Tiger over 
again, and not so cleverly handled as that little 
masterpiece, for, as we shall presently see, Her- 
vieu solves the riddle in a very prosaic fashion. 
A big interrogation point at the end would be 
the only excuse for a recrudescence of a play of 
the Dumas sort. When Richard Strauss com- 
posed the enigmatic tonalities at the close of his 
Tone poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra, he did 
so because he could not logically leave us on 
a full harmonic close. Since Hervieu did not 
develop his theme broadly and allowed it to de- 
generate into the theatric device of guessing the 
girl, he might have followed Frank Stockton 
and Richard Strauss — withheld the complete 
denouement and sent us home wondering. But 
his artistic conscience began to operate at the 
close of Act II, and not daring in Act III, he 
despatches his young lover out to the dewy 
morn, there to shoot himself. This suicide cuts 
226 



PAUL HERVIEU 

the tangle. The sister who quails at the news 
is the guilty one — a Solomon-like judgment, if 
ever there was one. 

The gunshot rouses the women. Leonore it 
is who shudders and screams; Giselle is only 
shocked. The complacent face of her husband 
at this juncture is a study in selfishness. Leo- 
nore's husband throttles her and is pulled off just 
in time. He bids her live — he knows how to 
torture ; and as the curtain falls the Marquis in 
the centre of the picture invokes the curse of 
heaven on a social system that tolerates such 
hideous cruelty. 

It may be seen that the intellectual playwright 
takes advantage of a situation in Pagliacci or in 
Catulle Mendes's La Femme de Tabarin ; when 
the lover is being killed or is killed, the grief of 
the "guilty" wife betrays her secret to the 
world. It is lacking in novelty, yet a sound 
situation psychologically. The torture motive is 
not new. 

However, Paul Hervieu's reputation does not 
stand or fall on this drama any more than it 
does on his novels, Flirt and L' Armature. Les 
Paroles Restent has a theme cleverly invented, 
above all cleverly handled. A man sets in 
motion a lie about a young girl in society, 
though he believes it is the truth. Later he 
meets and loves her. His remorse is great when 
he discovers that she is innocent. To make 
reparation (oh, masculine vanity of vanities !) he 
resolves to confess both his love and his fault 
227 



ICONOCLASTS 

He does so. The woman, Regine de Vesles, is 
outraged in her pride, in her love, to discover 
that her secret calumniator is the man she has 
adored. She parts from him. A duel is pre- 
cipitated — lugged in by the hair, really — and 
De Nohan is dangerously wounded. Naturally 
Regine goes to his bedside and pardons him. 
They are sure to be happy. Alas ! les paroles 
restent, and after De Nohan hears repeated his 
vile slander he dies. The situations are effective 
throughout, the character-drawing subtle. 

This play is full of melodrama, and, as has been 
pointed out, contains " several weapons borrowed 
from the arsenal of the inexhaustible Scribe." 
Hervieu followed it with Les Tenailles, which 
was at once a challenge to his critic and 
a greater play. Tenailles (nippers) — horrible 
word ! Here the author gives us human nature 
in the raw. A woman is married to a man she 
does not love. He, it appears, makes no attempt 
to secure her love. She really loves a famous 
man, a traveller. She tells her husband so. 
She will not deceive him, as other feebler 
women would ; she must leave at once. But 
the husband of Irene Fergan is cool-headed. 
He asks his wife how she proposes to escape the 
hateful marriage tie. She must give the law a 
reason, a motive. Collusion is the only remedy, 
and he will not enter into any such conspiracy. 
Then she declares she will run away. Not far, 
he calmly replies, for there is always the police. 
No matter what she does, he will not let her go. 
228 



PAUL HERVIEU 

Bowing her head, the woman submits, The 
wife is the prisoner of the husband, the woman 
bond-slave of the man, despite all our gabbling 
about emancipation and equal rights in this en- 
lightened century. 

Ten years pass, when the curtain again rises. 
There is a child ; the home is seemingly a placid 
one. The little son must be sent to school. 
Another crisis. There is a terrible duel of 
words and will. Enraged she cries, " The child 
is not yours," and then confesses — no, confesses 
is not the word, rather boasts, that she had a 
lover, the man she always loved, the traveller. 
The husband now no longer claims the other's 
son; he will even grant the divorce. The 
culmination comes when Irene refuses to be 
thrust out of doors, — the child has just passed 
through the room, — she has borne the agony of 
ten years. They must go hand in hand manacled 
to the end, let the nippers gall as they will. 
There is the child. Its future is at stake. 
"But," the man whimpers, "you are guilty and 
I am innocent." — "No," she says, "we are 
only two miserable people, and misery knows 
none but equals." The answer is like the harsh 
stroke of a savage alarm bell. It startled all 
Paris for many months. Les paroles restent ! 

The Law of Man is even more tense and dis- 
agreeable than its predecessor. Herein the 
problem posed is this (for with Hervieu the play 
is always a problem ; like Ibsen he asks ques- 
tions and seldom answers them, though it may 
229 



ICONOCLASTS 

be premised that while he has much of Ibsen's 
gloom and love for the unusual, he lacks the 
cold, concentrated logic of the Norwegian) : 
A woman surprises her husband by means of 
letters, but does not leave him. Her daughter 
falls in love with the son of the woman who has 
caused the trouble. Poor wife, poor mother, 
she is confused at these crossroads of misery. 
Sacrifice her daughter and appease her ven- 
geance, or — hold her silence for evermore? She 
prefers the former, and summoning the husband 
of her own husband's mistress, the father of the 
young man who seeks the hand of her innocent 
daughter, she tells the secret. After the first 
natural rage, this undeceived man, more merci- 
ful than the woman, insists on her silence. 
Two innocent young folk must not have their 
happiness slain because of their parents' sins. 
And as it is his right, the selfish and wretched 
woman must submit. A way is found to make 
the lovers happy, and the play ends, leaving all 
sorts of interrogation marks in the air. There 
are big things in this drama. 

La Course du Flambeau played by Rejane 
with such striking effect is judged by some of 
Hervieu's admirers as his masterpiece. It is 
not, though an exceedingly interesting work 
replete with wisdom and several strong studies 
of character. Sabine Revel, who sacrifices her 
mother for the sake of her daughter and is in 
turn herself sacrificed, illustrates the not un- 
common fate of a selfish daughter and a too 
230 



PAUL HERVIEU 

fond mother. The Greek motto embodied in the 
title — the passing on of the illuminated torch, 
according to Lucretius, at the "lampadophories" 
festival in Athens — is employed by the drama- 
tist as a symbol of the chain of life, the light 
passed on from one generation to another with 
the sacrificing of the old by the young which 
characterizes human existence. 

Yet there is no hint of Ibsen in this symbol ; 
Hervieu is a painter of manners, and a psychol- 
ogist, not a poet. He confessed to me, while 
graciously submitting to be " interviewed," that 
Ibsen has had little part in his development. 
He is a true Frenchman and really derives from 
Dumas fits in his love of the problem posed ; 
while his cerebral temperament makes him more 
of a disciple of Stendhal and Becque than of the 
very emotional, modern Germans and Scandi- 
navians. Yet he has an emotive temperament 
— a glance at his sympathetic eyes will prove 
it. He is a man with too large a head for his 
frame. He feels too deeply to be happy. 
M. Alfred Binet, in his precise psychological 
study of the dramatist, describes his sober 
methods of travail, his slow composition, his 
philosopher's dislike of the hasty or the impro- 
vised, and his fondness for clearly articulated 
dialogue. He has the logical imagination, he 
disdains the Zola " human documents " in pre- 
paring his story, and while he is by nature an 
ironist, he is too serious in his outlook on life 
to play the part of a mystifier. " Irony is the 
2V 



ICONOCLASTS 

speech of the timid man," he said to me, when 
we spoke of Becque and his too cynical disci- 
ples. An anxious sincerity is the key-note of 
M. Hervieu's character. He abhors the facile 
triumphs of the Parisian play-maker who dallies 
.. with ignoble themes. A finely attuned intellect, 
; a plentiful sympathy with suffering, a special sen- 
sitiveness to the soul feminine, combined with 
real artistry, — though he despises mere tech- 
nical dexterity, — all have made Paul Hervieu 
the present master-psychologist of the French 
stage. 



9U 



VI 

THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 



To my friend, George Bernard Shaw, the Celtic super- 
man, critic, novelist, socialist, and preface writer, to whom 
the present author — circa 1890 — played the part of a 
critical finger-post for the everlasting benefit (he sincerely 
hopes) of the great American public ; and to whom he now 
dedicates this particular essay in gratitude for the rare and 
stimulating pleasure afforded him by the Shaw masques, 
the Shavian philosophy, and also the vivid remembrance 
of several personal encounters at London and Bayreuth. 

The announcement that Bernard Shaw, moral- 
ist, Fabianite, vegetarian, playwright, critic, Wag- 
nerite, Ibsenite, jester to the cosmos, and the 
most serious man on the planet, had written a 
play on the subject of Don Juan did not surprise 
his admirers. As Nietzsche philosophized with 
a hammer, so G. B. S. hammers popular myths. 
If you have read his Caesar and Cleopatra you 
will know what I mean. This witty, sarcastic 
piece is the most daring he has attempted. 
Some years ago I described the Shaw literary 
pedigree as — W. S. Gilbert out of Ibsen. His 
plays are full of modern odds and ends, and in 
form are anything from the Robertsonian com- 
233 



ICONOCLASTS 

edy to the Gilbertian extravaganza. They may 
be called psychical farce, an intellectual come- 
die rosse — for his people are mostly a black- 
guard crew of lively marionettes all talking pure 
Shaw-ese. Mr. Shaw has invented a new indi- 
vidual in literature who for want of a better 
name could be called the Super-Cad ; he is Nietz- 
sche's Superman turned " bounder " — and some- 
times the sex is feminine. 

We wonder what sort of drama this remarkable 
Hibernian would have produced if he had been 
a flesh-eater. If he is so brilliant on bran, what 
could he not have accomplished on blood ! . One 
thing is certain — at the cosmical banquet where 
Shaw sits is the head of the table — for him. 

When Bernard Shaw told a gaping world that 
he was only a natural-born mountebank with a 
cart and a trumpet, a sigh of relief was exhaled 
in artistic London. So many had been taking 
him seriously and swallowing his teachings, 
preachings, and pronunciamentos, that to hear 
the merryman was only shamming, came as a 
species of liberation from a cruel obsession. 
Without paying the customary critical toll, Shaw 
had slipped duty free into England all manners 
of damnable doctrines. What George Moore 
attempted in a serious manner George Shaw, 
a fellow-Irishman, succeeded in accomplishing 
without the chorale of objurgation, groans, ex- 
clamations of horror, and blasts of puritanical 
cant. Thus Proudhon, Marx, Lassalle, Ibsen, 
Wagner, Nietzsche, and a lot of free-thinkers 
234 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

in socialism, religion, philosophy, and art, walked 
unmolested through the pages of critical reviews, 
while Mr. Moore was almost pilloried for advo- 
cating naturalism, while Vizetelly was sent to 
prison for translating Zola. 

After the Shaw criticisms came the novels, 
then the plays. The prefaces of the latter are 
literature, and will be remembered with joy 
when the plays are forgotten. In them the 
author has distilled the quintessence of Shaw. 
They will be classics some day, as the Dry- 
den prefaces are classics. Nevertheless, in the 
plays we find the old Shaw masquerading, this 
time behind the footlights. He is still the 
preacher, Fabian debater, socialist, vegetarian, 
lycanthrope, and normally abnormal man of the 
early days — though he prides himself on his 
abnormal normality. Finding that the essay 
did not reach a wide enough audience, the wily 
Celt mounts the rostrum and blarneys his listen- 
ers something after this manner : — 

" Here's my hustings ; from here will I 
teach, preach, and curse the conventions of 
society. Come all ye who are tired of the prop- 
erty fallacy ! There is but one Karl Marx, and 
I am his living prophet. Shakespeare must 
go — Ibsen is to rule. Wagner was a Fabian- 
ite ; the Ring proves it. Come all ye who are 
heaven-laden with the moralities ! I am the 
living witness for Nietzsche. I will teach chil- 
dren to renounce the love of parents; parents 
to despise their offspring; husbands to hate 
235 



ICONOCLASTS 

their wives ; wives to loathe their husbands ; 
and brothers and sisters will raise warring 
hands after my words have entered their souls. 
Whatever is is wrong — to alter Pope. The 
prostitute classes, — I do not balk at the ugly 
word, — clergymen, doctors, lawyers, statesmen, 
journalists, are deceiving you. They speak in 
divers and lying tongues. I alone possess the 
prophylactic against the evils of life. Here it 
is : Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant ; and Three 
Plays for Puritans." 

But Shaw only removed another of his in- 
numerable masks. Beware, says Nietzsche, of 
the autobiographies of great men. He was 
thinking of Richard Wagner. His warning 
applies to Bernard Shaw, who is a great come- 
dian and a versatile. He has spoken through 
so many different masks that the real Shaw is 
yet to be seen. Perhaps on his death-bed some 
stray phrase will illuminate with its witty gleam 
his true soul's nature. He has played tag with 
this soul so long that some of it has been lost 
in the game. Irishman born, he is not genial 
after the Oliver Goldsmith type ; he resembles 
much more closely Dean Swift, minus that 
man's devouring genius. When will the last 
mask be lifted — and, awful to relate, will it, 
when lifted, reveal the secret ? A master hyp- 
notist perhaps he may be, illuding the world 
with the mask idea. And what a comical thing 
it would be to find him smiling at the end and 
remarking, " I fooled you, Brethren, didn't I ? " 
236 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

In his many roles one trait has obstinately 
remained, the trait of irresistible waggery. Yet 
we sadly suspect it. What if this declaration 
of charlatanism were but a mask ! What if 
Shaw were really sincere ! What if he really 
meant to be sincere in his various lectures and 
comedies! What if his assumption of insin- 
cerity were sincere ! His sincerity insincere ! 
The thought confuses. In one of his plays — 
The Philanderer — a certain character has five 
or six natures. Shaw again, tonjours Shaw ! 

Joke of all jokes, I really imagine that Shaw is 
a sentimentalist in private ; and that he has been 
so sentimental, romantic, in his youth, that an in- 
version has taken place in his feelings. Swift's 
hatred of mankind was a species of inverted 
lyricism ; so was Flaubert's ; so may be Shaw's. 
Fancy him secretly weeping over Jane Eyre, 
or holding a baby in his lap, or — richest of all 
fancies — occasionally eating sausage and drink- 
ing beer! I met him, once upon a time, in 
Bayreuth. He spoke then in unmeasured terms 
of its beer drinkers, and added, without the 
ghost of a smile, that breweries should be con- 
verted into insane asylums. 

Whether we take him seriously or not, he is 
a delightful, an entertaining writer. His facile 
use, with the aid of the various mouthpieces he 
assumes at will, of the ideas of Nietzsche, Wag- 
ner, Ibsen, and Strindberg, fairly dazzles. He 
despises wit at bottom, using its forms as a 
medium for the communication of his theories. 
237 



ICONOCLASTS 

Art for art's sake is a contradiction to this 
writer. He must have a sense of beauty, but 
he never boasts of it ; rather does he seem to 
consider it something naked, almost shameful — 
something to be hidden away. So his men are 
always deriding art, though working at it like 
devils on high pay. This puritanical vein has 
grown with the years, as it has with Tolstoy. 
Only Shaw never wasted his youth in riotous 
living, as did Tolstoy. 

He had no money, no opportunities, no taste. 
A fierce ascetic and a misogynist, he will have 
no regrets at threescore and ten ; no sweet 
memories of headaches — he is a teetotaller; 
no heartaches — he is too busy with his books; 
and no bitter aftertaste for having wronged a 
fellow-being. Behold, Bernard Shaw is a good 
man, has led the life of a saint, worked like a 
hero against terrible odds, and is the kindest- 
hearted man in London. Now we have reached 
another mask — the mask of altruism. Nearly 
all his earnings went to the needy ; his was, and 
is, a pr^ticjULs^dalisjri. He never let his right 
hand know the extent of his charities, and mark 
this, — no one else knew of it. Yet good deeds, 
like murder, will out. His associates ceased de- 
riding the queer clothes, the flannel shirt, and 
the absence of evening dress ; his money was 
spent on others. So, too, his sawdust menu, — 
his carrots, cabbage, and brown bread, — it did 
not cost much, his eating, for his money was 
needed by poorer folk. So you see what a 
238 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

humbug is this dear old Diogenes, who growls 
cynically at the human race, abhors sentiment- 
mongers, and despises conventional government, 
art, religion, and philosophy. He is an arch- 
sentimentalist, underneath whose frown are con- 
cealed tears of pity. Another mask torn away 
— Bernard Shaw, philanthropist ! 

He tells us in the preface to Cashel Byron's 
Profession — which sounds like the title of a 
Charles Lever novel — that he had a narrow 
escape from being a novelist at the age of 
twenty-six. He still shudders over it. He 
wrote five novels, three of which we know, to 
wit : Cashel Byron's Profession, An Unsocial 
Socialist, Love Among the Artists — hideous 
and misleading- title. Robert Louis Stevenson 
took a great fancy to Cashel Byron and its stun- 
ning eulogies of pugilism. It was even drama- 
tized in this country. With Hazlitt and George 
Meredith (oh ! unforgettable prize-fight in The 
Amazing Marriage) Mr. Shaw praised the 
noble art of sluggerei. The Unsocial Socialist 
contains at least one act of a glorious farce 
comedy. He is Early British in his comedic 
writing. It is none the less capital fun. 

This book or tract — it is hardly a novel — ■ 
contains among other extraordinary things a 
eulogy of photography that would delight the 
soul of a Steichen. Shaw places it far 
above painting because of its verisimilitude ! It 
also introduces a lot of socialistic talk which 
is very unconvincing ; the psycho-physiologist 
239 



ICONOCLASTS 

would really pronounce the author a perfect 
specimen in full flowering of the saintly an- 
arch. There is a role played by a character 
— Shaw ? — which recalls Leonard Charteris in 
a later play, The Philanderer. All of his 
men are modelled off the same block. They 
are a curious combination of blackguard, phi- 
losopher, " bound er, art i st, and comedian. His 
women 1 Recall Stevenson's dismayed exclama- 
tion at the Shaw women ! They are creatures 
who have read Ibsen ; are, one is sure, dowdy ; 
but they interest. While you wonder at the 
strength of their souls, you do not miss the size 
of their feet. Mr. Shaw refuses to see woman 
as a heroine. She is sometimes a breeder of 
sinners, always a chronicler of the smallest kind 
of small beer, and for fear this sounds like an 
I ago estimate, he dowers her with an astounding 
intellectual equipment, and then lets the curious 
compound work out its own salvation. 

He is much more successful with his servants ; 
witness Bashville in Cashel Byron's Profession, 
most original of lackeys, and the tenderly 
funny old waiter in You Never Can Tell, a bit- 
ter farce well sprinkled with the Attic salt of 
irony. Otherwise Mr. Shaw has spent his time 
tilting at flagellation, at capital punishment, at 
the abuse of punctuation, at the cannibalistic 
habit of eating the flesh of harmless animals at 
Christmas, at Going to Church, extolling Czol- 
gosz — heavens ! the list is a league long. His 
novels as a whole are disappointing, though 
240 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

George Meredith has assured us in the first 
chapter of Diana that brain stuff in fiction is not 
lean stuff. But there are some concessions to 
be made to the Great God Beauty, and these 
Mr. Shaw has not seen fit to make. Episodes 
of brilliancy, force, audacity, there are; but 
episodes only. The psychology of a musician 
is admirably set forth in Love Among the 
Artists, and the story, in addition, contains one 
of the most lifelike portraits of a Polish pianiste 
that has ever been painted. John Sargent 
could have done no better in laying bare a soul. 
Ugliness is rampant — ugliness and brutality. It 
is all as invigorating as a bath of salt water 
when the skin is peeled off — it burns ; you 
howl ; Shaw grins. He hates with all the vigour 
of his big brain and his big heart to hear of the 
infliction of physical pain. He does not always 
spare his readers. Three hundred years ago he 
would have roasted heretics, for there is much 
of the grand inquisitor, the John Calvin, the 
John Knox, in Shaw. He will rob himself of 
his last copper to give you food, and he will 
belabour you with words that assault the tym- 
panum if you disagree with him on the subject 
of Ibsen, Wagner, or — anything he likes. 

Beefsteak, old Scotch ale, a pipe, and Mon- 
taigne — are what he needs for one year. Then 
his inhumane criticism of poor, stumbling man- 
kind's foibles might be tempered. Shaw de- 
spises weakness. He follows to the letter 
Nietzsche's injunction, Be hard! And there 
2 4 l 



ICONOCLASTS 

is something in him of Ibsen's pitiless attitude 
toward the majority, which is always in the 
wrong; yet is, all said and done, the majority. 
Facts, reality, truth — no Gradgrind ever de- 
manded them more imperiously than Heervatei 
Shaw, whose red beard and locks remind one 
of Conrad in Die Meistersinger. Earth folk do 
everything to dodge the facts of life, to them 
cold, harsh, and at the same time fantastic. 
Every form of anodyne, ethical, intellectual, 
aesthetical, is resorted to to deaden the pain of 
reality. We work to forget to live ; our religions, 
art, philosophy, patriotism, are so many buffers 
between the soul of man and bitter truth. 

Shaw wants the truth at all hazards ; his 
habit of veracity is like that of Gregers's Werle, 
is shocking. So he dips his subjects into a 
bath of muriatic acid and seems surprised at 
their wrigglings and their screams. " But I 
don't want to hear the truth ! " yells the victim, 
who then limps back to his comfortable lies. 
And the one grievous error is that our gallant 
slayer of dragons, our Celtic Siegfried, does 
not believe in the illusions of art. Its veils, 
consoling and beautiful, he will not have, and 
thus it is that his dramas are amusing, witty, 
brilliant, scarefying, but never poetic, never 
beautiful, and seldom sound the deeper tones of 
humanity. With an artist's brain, he stifles the 
artist's soul in him — as Ibsen never did. With 
all his liberalism he cannot be liberal to liber- 
alism, as Gilbert Chesterton so neatlv puts it. 
242 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

The Perfect Wagnerite and The Quintessence 
of Ibsenism are two supernally clever jeux 
cTesprit,, As he reads Shaw and Fabianism 
into the Ring of the Nibelungs, so his Ibsen 
is transformed into a magnified image of Shaw 
dropping ideas from on high with Olympian 
indifference. This pamphlet, among the first 
of its kind in English, now seems a trifle old- 
fashioned in its interpretation of the Norwegian 
dramatist — possibly because he is something so 
different from what Mr. Shaw pictured him. 
We are never shown Ibsen the artist, but al- 
ways the social reformer with an awful frown. 
He was a fighter for Ibsen, when in London 
Ibsen was once regarded as a perverter of 
morals. Bravery is Bernard's trump card. He 
never flinched yet, whether answering cat-calls 
from a first night's gallery or charging with pen 
lowered lance-fashion upon some unfortunate 
clerical blockhead who endeavoured to prove 
that hell is too good for sinners. 

It is easy to praise Mozart to-day ; not so easy 
to demonstrate the genius of Richard Strauss. 
Wagner in 1888 was still a bogie-man, a horrid 
hobgoblin threatening the peace of academic 
British music. Shaw took up the fight, just 
as he fought for Degas and Manet when he 
was an art critic. I still preserve with reverence 
his sweeping answer to Max Nordau. It wiped 
Nordau off the field of discussion. 

And the plays ! They, too, are controversial. 
They all prove something, and prove it so hard 
243 



ICONOCLASTS 

that presently the play is swallowed up by its 
thesis — the horse patiently follows the cart 
It may not be art, but it is magnificent Shaw. 
You can skip the plays, not the prefaces. 
Widowers' Houses is the most unpleasant, ugly, 
damnably perverse of the ten. The writer had 
read Ibsen's An Enemy of the People too closely. 
Its drainpipes, and not its glorification of the 
individual, got into his brain. It filtered forth 
bereft of its strength and meaning in this piece, 
with its nasty people, its stupidities. How could 
Shaw be so philistine, so much like a vestryman 
interested in pauper lodgings ? In the impla- 
cable grasp of Ibsen, this sordid theme would 
have been beaten on a red-hot anvil until shaped 
to something of purpose and power. Shaw was 
not blacksmith enough to swing the Ibsen 
hammer and handle the Ibsen bellows. He 
has written me on this subject that if I were 
a resident of London I would see my way clearer 
toward liking this play. It is, he asserts, a tran- 
script of the truth — which still leaves my argu- 
ment on its legs. 

The Philanderer, with its irresponsible levity 
and unexpected contortions, is a comedy of the 
true Shaw order. It is his Wild Duck, for in it 
he pokes fun at an Ibsen club, at the New 
Woman, and the New Sentiment, at almost 
everything he upholds in other plays and ways. 
There is a dramatic critic slopping over with 
British sentiment and other liquids. The women 
are absolutely incredible. The first act, like 
244 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

most of the Shaw first acts, is the best; best 
because, in his efforts to get his people going, 
the dramatist has little time to sermonize. He 
usually gets the chance later, to the detriment 
of his structure. The first act of The Phi- 
landerer would have made Henry Becque smile. 
It has something of the Frenchman's mordant 
irony — and then you never know what is going 
to happen. The behaviour of the two women re- 
calls a remark of Shaw's apropos of Strindberg ; 
Strindberg, who " shows that the female Yahoo, 
measured by romantic standards, is viler than 
her male dupe and slave." Here the conditions 
are reversed ; there is no romance ; the dupes 
are women, and also the Yahoos. The exposure 
of Julia's soul, poor, mean, sentimental, suffer- 
ing little creature, withal heroic, would please 
Strindberg himself. The play has an autobio- 
graphic ring. 

As to Mrs. Warren's Profession. It was 
played January 12, 1902, in London, by the 
Stage Society. Mr. Grein says that Mrs. War- 
ren's Profession is literature for the study. The 
mother is a bore, wonderfully done in spots (the 
spots especially) and the daughter a chilly, 
waspish prig. The men are better ; Sir George 
Crofts and the philandering young fellow could 
not be clearer expressed in terms of ink. I 
imagine that in a performance they must be 
extremely vital. And that weak old rout of a 
clergyman — why is Shaw so severe on clergy- 
men ? For the rest, Mrs. Warren's Profession 
245 



ICONOCLASTS 

creates a disagreeable impression, as the author 
intended it should. I consider it his biggest, 
and also his most impossible, opus. 

You Can Never Tell, Arms and the Man, 
Candida, and The Devil's Disciple are a quartet 
difficult to outpoint for prodigal humour and in- 
genious fantasy. In London the first named 
was voted irresistibly funny. It is funny, and 
in a new way, though the framework is old- 
fashioned British farce newly veneered by 
the malicious, the roistering humour of Shaw. 
Arms and the Man and The Devil's Disciple 
have been in Mr. Mansfield's repertory for 
years ; they need no comment further than say- 
ing that the first has something of the Gilbertian 
Palace of Truth topsy-turvying quality (Louka 
is a free paraphrase of Regina in Ghosts, though 
she talks Shaw with great fluency), with a 
wholly original content and characterization; 
and the second is perverse melodrama. 

Candida is not for mixed audiences. Christian 
socialism is caviare to the general. In charac- 
terization there is much variety ; the heroine — 
if there be such an anomaly as a Shaw heroine 
— is most engaging. Every time I read Candida 
I feel myself on the trail of somebody ; it is all 
in the air. The Lady from the Sea comes back 
when in that last scene, where the extraordinary 
young poet Marchbanks, a combination of the 
spiritual qualities of Shelley, Shaw, Ibsen's 
Stranger, and Shelley again, dares the fatuous 
James Morell to put his wife Candida to the 
246 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

test. It is one of the oddest situations in dra- 
matic literature, and it is all "prepared" with 
infinite skill. The denouement is another of 
Mr. Shaw's shower baths; withal a perfectly- 
proper and highly moral ending. You grind 
your teeth over it, as Mr. Shaw peeps across 
the top of the page, indulging in one of his 
irritating dental displays. 

The Man of Destiny is a mystification in one 
act. Napoleon talks the purest Balzac when he 
describes the English, and Mr. Shaw manipu- 
lates the wires industriously. It's good sport of 
its genre. 

Captain Brassbound's Conversion is pure 
farce. But the joy of Caesar and Cleopatra is 
abounding. You chortle over it as chortled 
Stevenson over the footman. A very devil of a 
play, one to read after Froude, Michelet, Shake- 
speare, or Voltaire for the real facts of the case. 
Since Suetonius, it is the first attempt at true 
Caesarean history. And the stage directions 
out-Maeterlinck Maeterlinck with their elabo- 
rate intercalations. The gorgeous humour of 
it all ! 

Arms and the Man has been translated into 
German and played in Germany. What will 
the Germans say to Caesar and Cleopatra ? They 
take Shaw too seriously now, which is almost as 
bad as not taking him seriously at all. What 
will the doctors of history do when the amazing 
character of Cleopatra is dissected ? If Shaw 
had never written another line but this bubbling 
247 



ICONOCLASTS 

study of antiquity, in which the spirit of the 
opera bouffe has not entered, he would be entitled 
to a free pass to that pantheon wherein our 
beloved Mark Twain sits enthroned. It is all 
truth-telling on a miraculous plane of reality, a 
reality which modulates and merges into fantasy. 
One almost forgets the prefaces and the notes 
after reading Caesar and Cleopatra. 

Whether he will ever vouchsafe the world a 
masterpiece, who can say ? Why demand so 
much? Is not he in himself a masterpiece ? It 
depends on his relinquishment of a too puritani- 
cal attitude toward art, life, and roast beef. He 
is too pious. Never mind his second-hand 
Nietzsche, his Diabolonian ethics, and his mod- 
ern version of Carlylean Baphometic Baptisms. 
They are all in his eye — that absolutely nor- 
mal eye with the suppressed Celtic twinkle. 
He doesn't mean a word he utters. (Who does 
when writing of Shaw ? ) I firmly believe he 
says his prayers every night with the family 
before he goes to his Jaeger-flannel couch ! 



II 

Candida is the very quintessence of her crea- 
tor. Many prefer this sprightly sermon dis- 
guised as a comedy to Mr. Bernard Shaw's 
more serious works. Yet serious it is. No 
latter-day paradoxioneer — to coin a monster 
word, for the Shaws, Chestertons, et al. — evokes 
laughter so easily as the Irishman. His is a 
248 



; 0* 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

cold intellectual wit, a Swiftian wit, minus the 
hearty and wholesome obscenity of the great 
Dublin dean. But it is often misleading. We 
laugh when we should reflect. We laugh when 
we might better hang our heads — this is meant 
for the average married and bachelor man. 
Shaw strikes fire in almost every sentence he 
puts into Candida's honest mouth. After read- 
ing his eloquent tribute to Ibsen, the crooked 
places in Candida become plainer ; her mission 
is not alone to undeceive but to love ; not only 
to bruise hearts but to heal them. 

In a singularly vivid passage on page 38 
of The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Mr. Shaw 
writes : " When Blake told men that through 
excess they would learn moderation, he knew 
that the way for the present lay through the 
Venusberg, and that the race would assuredly 
not perish there as some individuals have, and 
as the Puritans fear we all shall unless we find a 
way round. Also, he no doubt foresaw the time 
when our children would be born on the other 
side of it, and so be spared the fiery purga- 
tion." 

This sentiment occurs in the chapter devoted 
to a consideration of The Womanly Woman. 
Let us look at the phrases on the printed page 
of Candida that might be construed as bearing 
upon the above, or, rather, the result of the 
quoted passage. 

Candida speaks to James, her husband, in 
Act II : — 

249 



ICONOCLASTS 

Don't you understand ? I mean, will he forgive 
me for not teaching him myself ? For abandoning 
him to the bad woman for the sake of my good- 
ness — my purity, as you call it? Ah, James, how 
little you understand me, to talk of your confidence 
in my goodness and purity ! I would give them 
both to poor Eugene as willingly as I would give my 
shawl to a beggar dying of cold, if there were noth- 
ing else to restrain me. Put your trust in my love 
for you, James, for if that went I should care very 
little for your sermons — mere phrases that you cheat 
yourself and others with every day. 

Here is one of the most audacious speeches in 
any modern play. It has been passed over by 
most English critics who saw in Candida merely 
an attempt to make a clergyman ridiculous, not 
realizing that the theme is profound and far- 
reaching, the question put being no more and 
no less than : Shall a married man expect his 
wife's love without working for it, without de- 
serving it ? Secure in his conviction that he was 
a model husband and a good Christian, the Rev. 
James Mavor Morell went his way smiling and 
lecturing. He had the "gift of gab," yet he 
was no humbug ; indeed, a sincerer parson does 
not exist. He is quite as sincere as Pastor 
Manders, much broader in his views, and conse- 
quently not half so dull. 

But he is, nevertheless, a bit of a bore, with 

his lack of humour and his grim earnestness. 

No doubt Shaw took his fling at that queer 

blending of Christianity and socialism, that Karl 

250 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

Marx in a parson's collar which startled London 
twenty years ago in the person of the Christian 
socialist clergyman. He saw, too, being a man 
with a sense of character values and their use 
in violent contrast, that to the rhapsodic and 
poetic Eugene Marchbanks, Morell would prove 
a splendid foil. And so he does. Between this 
oddly opposed pair stands on her solid, sensible 
underpinnings the figure of Candida. Realist as 
is Mr. Shaw, he would scout the notion of his 
third act being accepted as a transcript from 
life. For two acts we are in plain earthly at- 
mosphere ; unusual things happen, though not 
impossible ones. In the last act Shaw, droll 
dramatist and acute observer of his fellow-man's 
foibles, disappears, only to return in the guise 
of Shaw the preacher. 

And how he does throw a sermon at our heads ! 
The play is arrested in its mid-ocean, and the 
shock throws us almost off our feet. Do not be 
deceived. That mock bidding for the hand of 
Candida, surely the craziest farce ever invented, 
is but this author's cunning manner of driving 
home his lesson. Are you worthy of your wife ? 
Is the woman who swore to love and honour you 
(" obey " is not in the Shaw vocabulary, thanks 
to J. S. Mill) worthy of you ? If your love is 
not mutual then better go your ways — you pro- 
fane it ! Is this startling ? Is this novel ? No 
and yes. The defence of love for love's sake, 
coming from the lips of a Shaw character, has 
a surprising effect, for no man is less concerned 
251 



ICOMOCLASTS 

with sex questions, no man has more openly de- 
preciated the ascendancy of sex in art and litera- 
ture. He would be the first to applaud eagerly 
Edmund Clarence Stedman's question apropos 
of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass : Is there 
no other light in which to view the beloved one 
than as the future mother of our children ? (I 
trust to a treacherous memory ; the meaning is 
expressed, though not in Mr. Stedman's words.) 
Therefore Candida is a large exposition of the 
doctrine that love should be free, — which is by 
no means the same thing as free love ; that it 
should be a burden equally borne by both part- 
ners in the yoke ; that happiness, instead of 
misery, would result if more women resembled 
Candida in candour. She cut James to the heart 
with the confounding of her shawl and per- 
sonal purity ; it was an astounding idea for a 
clergyman's ears. She proved to him later that 
she was right, that the hundredth solitary sinner 
is of more consequence than the ninety-nine re- 
claimed. Shaw, who is a Puritan by tempera- 
ment, has, after his master, Ibsen, cracked with 
his slingstone many nice little glass houses 
wherein complacent men and women sit and 
sun their virtues in the full gaze of the world. 
One of his sharp and disconcerting theories is 
that woman, too, can go through the Venusberg 
and still reach the heights — a fact always de- 
nied by the egotistical man, who wishes to be 
the unique sinner so that he may receive the 
unique consolation. After a gay life, a sober 
252 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

one ; the reformed rake ; Tannhauser's return to 
an Elizabeth, who awaits him patiently; dear, 
sweet, virtuous Penelope ! Shaw sees through 
this humbug of the masculine pose and turns the 
tables by making his Candida ride the horse of 
the dilemma man-fashion. Maeterlinck, in his 
Monna Vanna and Joyzelle, enforces the same 
truth — that love to be love should be free. 

And the paradoxical part of it all is that 
Candida is a womanly woman. She is so do- 
mestic, so devoted, that the thin-skinned idealist 
Eugenie moans over her kitchen propensities. 
Shaw has said that " the ideal wife is one who 
does everything that the ideal husband likes, and 
nothing else," which is a neat and sardonic 
definition of the womanly woman's duty. Can- 
dida demands as her right her husband's trust 
in her love, not heavenly rewards, not the con- 
sciousness of her own purity, not bolts and bars 
will keep her from going from him if the hour 
strikes the end of her affection. All of which 
is immensely disconcerting to the orthodox of 
view, for it is the naked truth, set forth by a 
man who despises not orthodoxy, but those who 
profess it only to practise paganism. This 
Shaw is a terrible fellow ; and the only way to 
get rid of a terrible fellow is not to take him 
seriously but to call him paradoxical, entertain- 
ing ; to throw the sand of flattery in his eyes and 
incidentally blind criticism at the same time. 
But Bernard Shaw has always refused to be 
cajoled, and as to the sand or the mud of abuse 
253 



ICONOCLASTS 

— well, he wears the very stout spectacles of 
common sense. 

Ill 

What does Mr. Shaw himself think of Can- 
dida ? Perhaps if he could be persuaded to tell 
the truth, the vapourish misconceptions concern- 
ing her terrible " shawl " speech — about which 

I never deceived myself — might be dissipated. 
It was not long forthcoming — his answer to 
my question, an answer the publication of which 
was left to my discretion. It may shock some 
of his admirers, disconcert others, but at the 
same time it will clear the air of much cant ; for 
there is the Candida cant as well as the anti 
Shaw cant. He wrote me : — 

Don't ask me conundrums about that very immoral 
female, Candida. Observe the entry of W. Burgess : 
" You're the lady as hused to typewrite for him." 

II No." " Naaaow : she was younger." And therefore 
Candida sacked her. Prossy is a very highly selected 
young person indeed, devoted to Morell to the extent 
of helping in the kitchen but to him the merest pet 
rabbit, unable to get the slightest hold on him. Can- 
dida is as unscrupulous as Siegfried : Morell himself 
sees that "no law will bind her." She seduces 
Eugene just exactly as far as it is worth her while to 
seduce him. She is a woman without " character " 
in the conventional sense. Without brains and 
strength of mind she would be a wretched slattern or 
voluptuary. She is straight for natural reasons, not 
for conventional ethical ones. Nothing can be more 

254 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

cold-bloodedly reasonable than her farewell to Eu- 
gene : " All very well, my lad ; but I don't quite 
see myself at fifty with a husband of thirty-five." It 
is just this freedom from emotional slop, this unerring 
wisdom on the domestic plane, that makes her so 
completely mistress of the situation. 

Then consider the poet. She makes a man of him 
finally by showing him his own strength — that David 
must do without poor Uriah's wife. And then she 
pitches in her picture of the home, the onions, and 
the tradesmen, and the cossetting of big baby Morell. 
The New York hausfrau thinks it a little paradise ; 
but the poet rises up and says, " Out then, into the 
night with me " — Tristan's holy night. If this greasy 
fool's paradise is happiness, then I give it to you 
with both hands, " life is nobler than that." That 
is the " poet's secret." The young things in front 
weep to see the poor boy going out lonely and broken- 
hearted in the cold night to save the proprieties of 
New England Puritanism ; but he is really a god 
going back to his heaven, proud, unspeakably con- 
temptuous of the " happiness " he envied in the days 
of his blindness, clearly seeing that he has higher 
business on hand than Candida. She has a little 
quaint intuition of the completeness of his cure ; she 
says, " he has learnt to do without happiness." 

So here is Shaw on Shaw, Shaw dissecting 
Candida, Shaw at last letting in light on the 
mystery of the " poet's secret ! " There may be 
grumbling among the faithful at this very illumi- 
nating and sensible exposition, I feel. So thinks 
Mr. Shaw, for he adds, " As I should certainly 
be lynched by the infuriated Candidamaniacs 
25* 



ICONOCLASTS 

if this view of the case were made known, 1 
confide it to your discretion " — which by a 
liberal interpretation means, publish it and be 
hanged to you ! But " Candidamaniacs ! " Oh, 
the wicked wit of this man who can thus mock 
his flock ! His coda is a neat summing up : "I 
tell it to you because it is an interesting sample 
of the way in which a scene, which should be 
conceived and written only by transcending the 
ordinary notion of the relations between the 
persons, nevertheless stirs the ordinary emotions 
to a very high degree, all the more because the 
language of the poet, to those who have not the 
clew to it, is mysterious and bewildering and 
therefore worshipful. I divined it myself before 
I found out the whole truth about it." 



IV 

Some day in the far future, let us hope, when 
the spirit of Bernard Shaw shall have been 
gathered to the gods, his popular vogue may be 
an established fact. Audiences may flock to 
sip wit, philosophy, and humour before the foot- 
lights of the Shaw theatre; but unless the as- 
semblage be largely composed of Shaw replicas, 
of overmen and overwomen ("oversouls," not 
altogether in the Emersonian sense), it is difficult 
to picture any other variety listening to Man 
and Superman. For one thing, it is not a play 
to be played, though it may be read with delight 
bordering on despair. A deeper reason exists 
256 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

for its hopelessness — it is such a violent attack 
on what might be called the Shaw super- 
structure, that his warmest enemies and chilliest 
admirers will wonder what it is all about. Even 
William Archer, one of the latter, confessed his 
disappointment. 

Man and Superman — odious title — is Shaw's 
new attempt at a Wild Duck, formerly one of 
Ibsen's most puzzling productions. Shaw mocks 
Shaw as Ibsen sneered at Ibsen. This method 
of viewing the obverse of your own medal — 
George Meredith would say the back of the 
human slate — is certainly a revelation of mood- 
versatility, though a disquieting one to the man 
in the street. It does not seem to be playing 
fair in the game. Sometimes it is not. With 
Ibsen it was ; he wished to have his fling at 
the Ibsenite, and he had it. Shaw-like one is 
tempted to exclaim, Aha ! drums and trumpets 
again, even if the cart be re-painted. ( Vide 
his earlier prefaces.) 

The book is dedicated to Mr. Arthur Bingham 
Walkley, who once wrote of his friend, " Mr. 
Bernard Shaw fails as a dramatist because he 
is always trying to prove something." In the 
end it is Shaw the man who is more interesting 
than his plays, — all the characters are so many, 
— Shaw's winking at one through the printed 
dialogue. 

In the pleasing and unpleasing plays, in the 
puritanical comedies, his " forewords " were full 
of meat served up with a Hibernian sauce, which 
257 



ICONOCLASTS 

produced upon the mental palate the flavours of 
Swift, of Nietzsche, of Aristophanes, and of 
Shaw. This compound could not be slowly de- 
gustated, because the stuff was too hot. Velocity 
is one of Shaw's prime characteristics. Like a 
pianoforte virtuoso whose fingers work faster 
than his feelings, the Irishman is lost when he 
essays massive, sonorous cantilena. He is as 
emotional as his own typewriter, and this defect, 
which he parades as did the fox in the fable, has 
stood in the way of his writing a great play. 
He despises love, and therefore cannot appeal 
deeply to mankind. 

In the present preface the old music is 
sounded, but brassier and shriller ; the wires art 
wearing. It is addressed to Arthur Bingham 
Walkley, by all odds the most brilliant, erudite, 
and satisfying of English dramatic critics. Now 
the cruel thing about this preface is that in it 
the author tries to foist upon the critic of the 
London Times the penalty attached to writing 
such a play as Man and Superman. We all can- 
not be Drydens and write prefaces as great as 
poems ; and Mr. Shaw might have left out either 
the play or the preface and spared the nerves of 
his friends. He started out to make a play on 
Don Juan, an old and ever youthful theme. He 
succeeded in turning out an amorphous monster, 
part dream, part sermon, that will haunt its cre- 
ator as Frankenstein was haunted for the rest 
of his days. Man and Superman is a night- 
mare. 

t*8 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

To be impertinent is not necessarily an evi- 
dence of wisdom ; nor does the dazzling epigram 
supply the missing note of humanity. But our 
author is above humanity. He would deal with 
the new man who is to succeed the present used- 
up specimen. We must freeze up, if needs be 
by artificial process, all the springs of natural 
instincts. Man must realize that in the inevita- 
ble duel of the sexes he will be worsted unless 
he recognizes that he is the pursued, not the 
pursuer. In the animal kingdom it is the male 
that is gorgeously bedizened for the purpose of 
attracting the feebler faculty of attention in the 
female. But in the human order the man is the 
cynosure of the woman. Her whole education 
and existence is an effort to win him — perhaps 
not for himself, nevertheless to win and wear 
him. This is biologically correct, though hardly 
gallant; and it is as old as Adam and Eve. 
Henry James once defined the situation suc- 
cinctly, "It was much more the women . . . 
who were after the men than the men who were 
after the women ; it was literally visible that the 
general attitude of one sex was that of the object 
pursued and defensive, apologetic and attenuat- 
ing. . . ." (In the Cage.) 

Mr. Shaw might have added that, unlike 
lightning, women strike twice in the same spot. 
Frivolity, however, is not in Mr. Shaw's present 
scheme of applied Unsociology. 

As is the case with most reformers, he has 
harked back to the past for his future types 
259 



ICONOCLASTS 

His men and women, though they go down to 
the sea in motor cars, converse about Ibsen, 
Nietzsche, and Karl Marx, affect twentieth-cen- 
tury modes, are in reality as old as the hills and 
as savage as hillmen. They are only a trifle 
more self-conscious. The present play — let us 
call it one for the sake of the argument — deals 
with a precious "baggage" named Ann White- 
field. She is, in the words of Ibsen, " a mighty 
huntress of men." She is pert, very vulgar, 
quite uncivilized, quite ignorant of everyday 
feminine delicacies ; in a word, the new woman, 
according to the gospel of Shaw. Her pursuit 
of a man, unavowed, bold, is the story of the 
play. She is hot-footed after a revolutionary 
socialist, John Tanner. Every word that springs 
or saunters from his lips, every movement of his 
muscular person, betrays the breed of Daredevil 
Dick, of all the revolutionaries in all the Shaw 
plays — the true breed of which Saint Bernard 
is himself the unique protagonist. Tanner is 
rich and believes himself an anarchist. He is 
mistaken. He is only a Fabianite with cash, a 
Fabianite who has lost the " shining face " of a 
neophyte and talks daggers and dynamite, though 
he uses them not. Ann has been left an orphan. 
She is a new Hedda Gabler, who knows what she 
wants, sees it, secures it ; therefore she burns no 
dramatic "children," sends no man to a drunk- 
ard's doom ; nor will she, one feels quite certain, 
deceive her husband. To secure him she at- 
tempts all the deception before she marries him, 
260 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

and if she seldom succeeds with her white lies 
she nevertheless bags her game. 

To supply these two pleasing persons with 
characters upon whom they may act and be 
reacted, Mr. Shaw has devised a middle-aged 
hypocrite, a whited sepulchre and man of the 
world, named Roebuck Ramsden ; a sap-headed 
young man who dotes so much on Ann that he 
sacrifices his own happiness that she may be 
happy — or humbugs himself into that belief ; 
a self-willed young lady, his sister Violet, who 
conceals her marriage with evil results to her 
reputation ; a comical low-comedy chauffeur ; 
several pale persons ; a snobbish American 
youth of humble Irish parentage gilded by 
American wealth ; some brigands, a dream Don 
Juan, and last, but not least, the Devil, who in 
this case is not a gentleman. 

The first act is promising. Mr. Shaw's little 
paragraphs — they are intended as a prompt- 
book in miniature — are more amusing than his 
preface. We are deluded into the notion that a 
first-class comedy is at hand. There are all the 
materials ready. Ramsden, an "advanced" 
thinker of the antiquated Bradlaugh type, has 
been appointed co-executor, co-guardian with 
Tanner, a thinker of the latter-day type ; that 
is, a man who has read Marx, Proudhon, 
Nietzsche, but not Max Stirner. The fair Ann, 
her mother and sister are the stakes of the 
game. Octavius, the sap-headed young man, is 
ready to sacrifice himself, and his sister shocks 
261 



ICONOCLASTS 

all by not acknowledging the father of her un« 
born child. Here is potential stuff for a tragic 
comedy. But Mr. Shaw will not mould his 
material into viable shapes. He refuses to be 
an artist. He loathes art. And so he is pun- 
ished by fate — his inspiration vanishes almost 
at the point of execution, and, except for a few 
fugitive flashes, never burns serenely or continu- 
ously. 

One telling bit is when Tanner congratulates 
Violet (what an appropriate name !) on her 
delicate condition and is scorned by that young 
person, scorned and snubbed. What — she a 
wicked woman ! No, she is but secretly 
wedded; in the fulness of time her husband 
will be revealed. Tanner sneaks away, feeling 
that not to women must man look for the eman- 
cipation of the sexes from conventional notions. 
There are long harangues on prevailing economic 
evils, social diseases — all the old Shaw griev- 
ances are paraded. 

Act II is rather thin. In Act III, which 
recalls a Gilbertian farce, there are cockney 
brigands, a bandit corporation, limited, devoted 
to the robbing of automobiles that pass through 
Spain. The idea is not sufficiently novel to be 
funny. A lengthy parabasis, written in genuine 
Shavian, shows us hell, the Devil, Don Juan, 
and Anna of Mozartean fame. At least the 
talk here is as brilliant as is commonly supposed 
to prevail in the nether regions. Inter alia, 
we read that marriage is the most licentious 
262 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

of human institutions — hence its popularity. 
Even the Devil is shocked. " The confusion of 
marriage with morality has done more to destroy 
the conscience of the human race than any other 
single error." " Beauty, purity, respectability, 
religion, art, patriotism, bravery, and the rest are 
nothing but words which I or any one else can 
turn inside out like a glove," continues this re- 
lentless rake and transformed preacher. Too 
true ; but the seamy side as exhibited by Don 
Juan Shaw is not so convincing as in Nietzsche's 
transvaluation of all values. " They are mere 
words, useful for duping barbarians into adopt- 
ing civilization, or the civilized poor into sub- 
mitting to be robbed and enslaved." 

Admitted, keen dissector of contemporary ills ; 
but how about your play ? In effect the author 
says : " To the devil with all art and plays, my 
play with the rest ! What I wish to do is to 
tell you how to run the universe ; and for this I 
will, if necessary, erect my pulpit in hell ! " 

After this what more can be said ? The play 
peters out ; there is talk, talk, talk. Ann calls 
the poetic temperament " the old maid's temper- 
ament " ; the brigand chief sententiously re- 
marks : " There are two tragedies in life : one 
is not to get your heart's desire ; the other is to 
get it " — which sounds as if wrenched from a 
page of Chamfort or Rivarol ; and Ann con- 
cludes with " Go on talking, Tanner, talking ! " 
It is the epitaph of the piece, dear little mis- 
shapen, still-born comedy. Well may Mr 
263 



ICONOCLASTS 

Shaw write " universal laughter ' ; at the end. 
Yet I am willing to wager that some critics will 
be in tears at this exhibition of perverse waste 
and clever impotency. 

The Revolutionists' Handbook and Pocket 
Companion, which tops this extraordinary con- 
tribution, sociology masking as comedy, is its 
chiefest attraction. There, petrified into glis- 
tening nuggets, may be found Shaw philoso- 
phy, Shaw humour. There are maxims, too. 
" Do not unto others as you would that they 
should do unto you. Their tastes may not be 
the same." This smacks of the inverted wisdom 
of the late James Whistler. Marriage, crime, pun- 
ishment, the beating of children, title, honours, 
property, servants, religion, virtues, vices — 
everything of vital import to thinking men and 
women is regarded with the charmingly malevo- 
lent eye of Shaw. He exclaims : " Property, 
said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only per- 
fect truism that has been uttered on the subject." 
Come, come, Bernard Shaw ! Proudhon said it, 
but the speech was not his own property. You, 
who know your social classics so well, should 
have remembered Brissot's Philosophical Exam- 
ination of Property and Theft, only published 
in 1780! You also say, " Beware the man 
whose God is in the skies," and " Every man 
over forty is a scoundrel." Tut, tut ! Why not 
add — all girls over fifty should be drowned ? It 
is just as logical. But can one condense the 
cosmos in a formula ? 

264 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

The general impression of the book causes us 
to believe there is a rift in the writer's lute ; not 
in his mentality, but in his own beliefs, or scep- 
ticisms. Perhaps Shaw no longer pins his faith 
to Shaw. Ibsen asserts that after twenty years 
a truth that has outlived its usefulness is no 
longer truth, but the simulacrum of one. Shaw's 
truths may be decaying. We feel sure that if 
they be, he will be the first to detect the odour 
and warn away his public. Some years ago he 
printed a pamphlet against anarchy and anar- 
chist, which was to be expected from a mild, 
frugivorous man. Now he seems to be weary- 
ing of the milk-white flag of socialism; and yet 
his revolutionary maxims are maxims for children 
in the time of teething. The world has moved 
since the Fabian society scowled at the British 
lion and tried to twist its tail with the dialectics 
of moderate socialism. To use Mr. Shaw's own 
pregnant remark, " Moderation is never ap- 
plauded for its own sake " ; and : " He who can, 
does. He who cannot, teaches." Fabianism 
taught, taught moderation ! Yet to-day the 
real thing is not Elisee Reclus, but Michael 
Bakounin ; not Peter Kropotkin, but Sergei 
Netschajew ; not Richard Wagner, but his 
friend, Roeckel, who was sent by him across 
the cannon-shattered barricades at Dresden in 
1849 to fetch an ice to the thirsty composer. 
Wagner rang the alarm bells on this opera 
bouffe and escaped to Switzerland, Bakounin 
and Roeckel remained and went to prison! 
265 



ICONOCLASTS 

Shaw is still ringing alarm bells, but somehow 
or other their music is missing and carries no 
message to his listeners. Is it possible that he 
regrets the anarchy that he has never had the 
courage to embrace and avow ? A born anarchist, 
individualist, revolutionist, he has always gone 
in for half-hearted measures of reform. Never, 
like Bakounin, has he applied the torch, thrown 
the bomb ; never, like Netschajew, has he dared 
to pen a catechism of destruction, a manual of 
nihilism so terrific that advanced Russian think- 
ers shudder if you mention its title. It is even 
rumoured that the Irish dramatist serves his 
parish as a meek citizen should — he will be 
writing poetry or melodrama next. His pessi- 
mism is temperamental, not philosophical, like 
that of most pessimists, as James Sully has 
pointed out. And instead of closely observing hu- 
manity, after the manner of all great dramatists, 
he has only closely studied Bernard Shaw. 

" Regarded as a play, Man and Superman is, I 
repeat, primitive in invention and second rate in 
execution. The most disheartening thing about 
it is that it contains not one of those scenes of 
really tense dramatic quality which redeemed 
the squalor of Mrs. Warren's Profession, and 
.made of Candida something very like a master- 
apiece." Thus William Archer. 



Most modestly Mr. Shaw entitles a farce of 
his, the celebrated drama in two tableaux and 
266 



THE QUINTESSENCE OF SHAW 

in blank verse, — The Admirable Bashville, or 
Constancy Unrewarded. It is nothing else but 
the story of Cashel Byron's Profession put into 
blank verse, because, as Mr. Shaw says, blank 
verse is so much easier to write than good prose. 
It is printed at the end of the second edition of the 
prize-fighting novel. As there has been a drama- 
tization made — unauthorized — for a well-known 
American pugilist-actor, Mr. Shaw thought that 
he had better protect his English interests. Hence 
the parody for copyright purposes which was pro- 
duced in London the summer of 1903 by the 
Stage Society at the Imperial Theatre. It is 
funny. It gibes at Shakespeare, at the modern 
drama, at Parliament, at social snobbery, at Shaw 
himself, and almost everything else within reach 
The stage setting was a mockery of the Eliza- 
bethan stage, with two venerable beef-eaters in 
Tower costume, who hung up placards bearing 
the legend, " A Glade in Wiltstoken Park," etc. 
Ben Webster as Cashel Byron and James Hearn 
as the Zulu King carried off the honours. Au- 
brey Smith, made up as Mr. Shaw in the costume 
of a policeman with a brogue, caused merriment, 
especially at the close, when he informed his 
audience that the author had left the house. 
And so he had. He was standing at the corner 
when I accosted him. Our interview was brief. 
He warned me in grave accents and a twin- 
kling Celtic eye never again to describe him 
as "benevolent." Half the beggars of London 
had winded the phrase and were pestering him 
267 



ICONOCLASTS 

at his back gate. Mr. Shaw still looks as if a 
half-raw beefsteak and a mug of Bass would do 
him a world of good. But who can tell ? He 
might then lose some of his effervescence — that 
quality of humour so happily described by Ed- 
mund Gosse when he spoke of the vegetable 
spirits of George Bernard Shaw. 

The new play, John Bull's Other Island, was 
first played in London by the Stage Society last 
November. It is said — by Shaw's warmest 
enemies — to be witty, entertaining, and dra- 
matically boneless. There is no alternative 
now for Mr. Shaw — he must visit America, 
lecture, and become rich. It is the logical con- 
clusion of his impromptu career, for it was first 
in America that the Shaw books and plays were 
successful and appreciated ; the plays largely 
because of the bold efforts of Arnold Daly and 
Winchell Smith, two young dramatic revolution- 
ists. And Mr. Shaw may rediscover America 
for the Americans ! 



268 



VII 

MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL 

De profundis ad te clamavi ! 

After witnessing a performance of Maxim 
Gorky's Nachtasyl — The Night Refuge is a 
fair equivalent in English — one realizes, not 
without a shudder, that there are depths within 
depths, abysms beneath abysms, still unexplored 
by the dramatic adventurer. The late Emile 
Zola posed all his lifetime as the father of 
naturalism in literature; but he might have 
gone to school to learn the alphabet of his art 
at the knees of the young man from Nijni Nov- 
gorod, Maxim Gorky. That anarchist of letters 
has taught us lessons of the bitterest import, 
Gorky the Bitter One. We know now that 
Zola was only masquerading in the gorgeous 
rags of romanticism with a vocabulary borrowed 
from Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Flaubert ; 
we know, too, that despite the argot of L'Assom- 
moir, the book is as romantic as a Bouguereau 
canvas — the formula is the same : highly glazed 
surfaces, smug sentiment, and pretty colouring. 
The difference is that while Zola painted low 
life like a born romantic, Bouguereau selected 
for his subjects the nymphs so dear to the lover 
269 



ICONOCLASTS 

of classic anthologies. To the night of his un 
fortunate death Zola believed himself a natu- 
ralist, though his books never escape the taint 
of melodrama. 

The naturalism of the Russians is in a differ- 
ent key. Gogol, the inimitable Gogol, wrote 
Dead Souls, and Russia had conquered the 
kingdom once ruled by Fielding. If Chateau- 
briand was the father of modern French prose, 
as Goethe asserted, from Gogol stemmed all the 
great modern Russians : Dostoievsky, Turgenev, 
Stchendrin, Tolstoy, Gorky ; and the last seems 
nearer the first than either Turgenev or Tolstoy. 
He is hardly ten years old artistically, yet his 
name is known from Siberia to the Sandwich 
Islands. He is read more in a day than Kipling 
is in a year, and, compared to Kipling, he is as 
flint to chalk, a man carved from the hardest 
granite. 

A revolutionary, inasmuch as he deliberately 
disowns, in his most characteristic work, all 
the devices of literature, of rhetoric, of literary 
architecture, he is at his worst in prolonged 
narrative, such as Foma Gordyeeff. And 
when he philosophizes he is long-winded. It 
is in the short tale with a simple setting that 
Gorky knows how to stir us. A strip of sea 
beach, the sky a hot azure, the water green as 
grass, two or three men and women, and we are 
given a tragedy in miniature. Or the steppes, 
sullen and brown, stretch before us to tne setting 
sun ; a few tramps talk at random, night falls 
270 



MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL 

Misery huddles close. We have felt the very 
pulse-beat of life — and such lives ! A wretched 
outcast, starved, wet as a dog in the rain — for he 
is but a dog in the rain — meets a woman as mis- 
erable and as degraded as himself. They man- 
age to steal some mouldy bread, and sleep one 
night in a cask. It is but the recital of one night. 
They drift apart in the morning, never to meet 
again. Why should they care ? Drab and 
monotonous, their soiled lives need be viewed 
but for a moment to surmise their future. Yet 
Gorky — for he is his own hero — contrives 
to sound undertones in this dark music that 
appeal. Instinctively he lays bare the souls 
of the men and women he dissects — souls as of 
muddy flame. A dreary sigh escapes their lips 
as they drag their poor carcases from place to 
place. Life has drugged them with sorrow. 
Why move at all ? Why live at all ? Why were 
they born ? Why do they die ? Existence is re- 
duced to a few primary movements ; eat, sleep ; if 
vodka can be secured, then drink it to oblivion, 
for the sole blessing in this vale of tears is 
oblivion. 

It may be seen that, compared to Gorky's 
rank, unsavoury, but sincere notation of facts, 
Thomas de Quincey's charming narrative of his 
youthful woes in Oxford Street — that "stony- 
hearted mother " — and his walks and talks 
with Anne, the noctambulist, is an idyll. Gorky 
transfers to his pages the odours of a starving, 
sweating humanity, its drunkenness, its explo- 
271 



ICONOCLASTS 

sions of rage, guttural cries of joy, and its all too 
terrible animalism. We turn our heads the other 
way when his women curse and rave. Walt 
Whitman, said Moncure Conway, brought the 
slop pail into the drawing-room ; but for Gorky 
there is no drawing-room. Life is only a dung 
heap. 

For years I have searched for the last word in 
dramatic naturalism, and in Gorky's Nachtasyl I 
found it. I heard it first in Berlin at the Kleines 
Theatre, and later in Vienna at the Deutsches 
Volkstheatre. Gorky, himself a lycanthrope, 
pessimist, despiser of his fellow-men, has as- 
sembled in this almost indescribable and un- 
speakable melange — for it is not a play — a 
set of men and women whose very lives smell 
to heaven ; the setting recalls one of his stories, 
Men with Pasts. (It is in Orloff and his 
Wife.) 

An utter absence of theatricalism arid a 
narvete" in dramatic feeling proclaim Gorky a 
man of genius and also one quite ignorant of 
the fundamental rules of the theatre. His four 
acts might be compressed into two, or, better 
still, into one. Only the fatigue and gloom en- 
gendered would interfere with this scheme, for 
there is far too much talk, far too little move- 
ment. Gorky, like many uneducated men of 
power, loves to moralize, to discuss life and its 
meanings. He is at times veritably sophomoric 
in this respect. Long speeches are put into the 
mouths of his characters, who forthwith spout 
272 



MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL 

the most dreary commonplaces about destiny, 
luck, birth, and death. 

The strength of the play lies in its presenta- 
tion of character. Characterization, with a slen- 
der thread of narrative, no effective "curtains," 
comprises the material of this vivid experiment. 
Nevertheless, it burns the memory because of 
its shocking candour and pity-breeding truths. 

One is struck by a certain resemblance to 
Charles Dickens in all the novels of the Rus- 
sians, Dosto'i'evsky and Gorky in particular. 
There are whole passages in Crime and Chastise- 
ment and Injury and Insult that might have been 
suggested by the English master of fiction. 
Gorky, like Gogol, loves to picture some poor 
wretch with a dominant passion, and then to 
place him in surroundings that will move the 
machinery of his being. And with all his hatred 
of life, of men, pity oozes from his pages, 
sometimes contemptuous, sometimes passionate, 
pity. The Night Refuge is a cellar with a 
kitchen, a few holes in the wall for sleeping pur- 
poses. Its counterpart exists in every great city. 
Thieves, prostitutes, men and women, the very 
dregs of life, pass their battered days and nights 
in these foul caves. Gorky confesses to having 
lived in such places while he wandered through 
some of the Russian towns. Anarchists are not, 
as is popularly supposed, born or bred in these 
pest alleys, whose inhabitants are too degraded, 
too worn out, to harbour plans for the overthrow 
of governments. The vermin that burrow in the 
273 



ICONOCLASTS 

mud and darkness are not dangerously brave or 
endowed with destructive energies. 

The keepers of the night asylum are a man 
and wife, a trifle better off than their lodgers 
in physique, for they are not drunkards. The 
husband is past fifty, an avaricious, snuffling, 
shuffling hypocrite, jealous of his young wife 
and brutal to the people he harbours. His wife 
is only twenty-six and hates her husband. She 
loves a young, good-looking thief who lives in 
the cellar, an aristocrat among his fellows, for 
he sleeps alone in a sort of cupboard, and only 
works at his " profession " when he needs 
money. He gets the hottest tea and the nicest 
morsels from the shrewish woman. Her voice, 
raucous and full of fury, is softened when she 
addresses her Wasjka. His companions know 
all about this affair, but are not jealous of him ; 
they are too indifferent to everything but their 
own wants to care for God or man, devils or 
angels. They are over-tramps, beings for 
whom the moralities, major and minor, no 
longer have any meaning. The thief is tired 
of the woman, tired of his life amid stupid peo- 
ple, and has cast his eyes on Natascha, the sister 
of his mistress. The elder woman realizes it 
and trouble is brewing when the curtain goes 
up. 

It is morning. A dull light filters from above 
on a mass of almost shapeless figures. One by 
one they stir. Yawns, half -stifled oaths, cough- 
ing, expectorations, noses noisily blown, whinings, 
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MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL 

cries of pain, harsh laughter, and suppressed 
sobbing — the hideous symphony of life at its 
lowest social ebb. Again you feel like averting 
your head, for such is the force of suggestion 
that a noisome odour seems to emanate from the 
stage and creep languidly through the audi- 
torium. 

The other dramatis persona: a policeman, 
uncle to the sisters ; a locksmith with a dying 
wife — dying of consumption brought on by the 
prolonged beatings at the hands of her semi- 
insane husband ; a street-walker — one who 
reads sentimental novels and speaks at intervals 
of a romance she had when younger ; a huck- 
stress, cynical, drunken, loud-mouthed ; a cap- 
maker who never works ; an actor who has 
forgotten his professional name, poisoned with 
alcohol ; a man named Satin, a good-natured, 
degenerate scoundrel ; a decayed baron, neuras- 
thenic, and with a face that recalls one of Dore's 
sketches of a damned soul — lean, always biting 
his nails, stuttering, his eyes blazing with the 
infernal fires of vodka madness ; an old man of 
venerable aspect, a pilgrim who happens in; 
his name is Luka and he is some sixty years of 
age. Then there is a young scapegrace shoe- 
maker who plays the concertina and always 
describes himself as a free man, a man without 
cares, a man who would not accept wealth if 
offered him. A Tartar and several porters and 
members of the barefoot brigade make up this 
unattractive company. 

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ICONOCLASTS 

How to weave a play from such unprom- 
ising material must have puzzled Gorky. Evi- 
dently he did not try, preferring the easier way 
of letting his people tell their own stories and 
reducing technical construction to a mere drop- 
ping of the curtain from time to time. In fact, 
there is far more dramatic intrigue in Tolstoy's 
Powers of Darkness, of which this piece is really 
a pendant. Gorky does not fear the naked 
truth as do many literary artists who have 
social position and reputations to maintain. 

The collision of character which is essential 
to the production of drama is brought about 
somehow or other, the chief means employed 
being Luka the pilgrim. This old man, who is 
as loquacious as Polonius and almost as platitu- 
dinous, changes the ideas of every one he meets. 
He finds the thief hard and impenitent; he points 
out to him that in Siberia, over yonder, is a wide, 
free land, where every man may hew a way for 
himself. The good-looking scamp tells him that 
thief he was born, thief he must remain ; that 
his father saw the inside of prisons ; that if he 
goes to Siberia it will be as a convict, and not of 
his own volition. Yet the words of the stranger 
have sunk a shaft into his consciousness, and 
despite his mockery of the old man's belief he 
pauses and reflects — why not ? Why not become 
a decent man, marry, beget children, and chuck 
the old life of crime and police espionage ? 
He loves Natascha. He hates her sister, and 
in the best scene of the play he lays his case 
276 



MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL 

clumsily but manfully before the girl. The 
crossroads of his life are arrived at — her deci- 
sion will settle which turn he is to take. 

Natascha is that mixture of good, bad, and 
indifferent in all of us, and is therefore a puzzle 
to audiences who like patterns made out of the 
whole cloth, without any dubious mixture of 
light and shade. She realizes that Wasjka has 
been her sister's lover ; she has been beaten so 
that her face and shoulders are often black and 
blue by her jealous sister ; she knows that her 
present life is a hell — yet she hesitates; Luka 
urges her. Wasjka pleads. Unluckily, the 
sister returns home earlier than expected and 
from a window overlooking the cellar up one 
short flight of stairs she overhears the entire 
conversation. Here is coincidence childishly 
introduced to unravel the simplest of dramatic 
knots. Yet it seems inevitable. The sister is 
an envious, prying woman, always spying upon 
her boarders. She may have hastened her de- 
votions at church — like her husband, she is 
bigoted and hypocritical — and quietly sneaked 
in to see what mischief her disreputable crew of 
lodgers were making. Pictorially the scene is 
striking. It recalls any one of the numerous 
kitchen pieces of Teniers or Ostade, in which a 
stout wench is courted, while from some aperture 
above a jealous wife threateningly peers. At 
the crucial moment in the play the angry crea- 
ture breaks out into a volley of abuse. A pretty 
state of affairs! Such goings-on in a respec 
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ICONOCLASTS 

table establishment if her back is turned for a 
half hour! A body can't go to church to pray 
for the sins of her neighbours without meddle- 
some old men entering unbidden a decent house 
and setting every one by the ears ! 

After she empties one vial of wrath upon 
Luka's head she uncorks another for her unfor- 
tunate sister's benefit. A lazy good-for-nothing, 
living on the bread of her relatives — a fine 
marriage she will make with a thief : a honey- 
moon in jail, perhaps ! The husband puts in 
nasty remarks, and Wasjka loses his temper. 
There is a short, sharp interchange of blows, 
but the men are torn asunder. Hush! the police 
are always lurking near by, and not even the 
uncle, himself a member of the force, a bribe- 
taker, gambler, and drunkard, could intervene 
where blood had been shed. But Wasjka's 
chance had passed. It does not return. Natas- 
cha, cowed, humbly goes upstairs to the kitchen, 
there to clean the samovar, and the aged Luka 
groans, for he knows what life is, with its queer 
eddies and whirlpools of chance. 

He has comforted the dying wife of the lock- 
smith, Anna by name, and, with all the ribaldry, 
drunkenness, and profanity around them, whis- 
pers in her ears consoling words. She has 
known naught but misery, starvation, cold, and 
blows her life long. Her brutal husband is 
presented as the type of the workman who is al- 
ways preaching of the dignity of labour. He is 
a workman, he proudly asserts to the thief, and 
278 



MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL 

files away at his locks while his wife lies gasp* 
ing. We catch a strain of Tolstoy in the retort 
of the thief, who tells him that work alone 
doesn't make a man. Thick of apprehension, 
the huge dolt sits and files. When his wife 
begs for more air, he tells her to go to the yard — 
the place is already too cold. Then he moves 
over to her and offers her some bread. He even 
asks if she suffers. Finally, with the others, he 
departs for the tavern. As she listens to Luka's 
words, Wasjka enters and laughs them to scorn. 
Is there a God ? The company, which has re- 
turned, discusses violently this question. Talk, 
talk, talk — the Russian tramp will talk all day 
if you give him a theme and a drink. If one 
believes in a God, interposes Luka, then God 
exists; if one does not, then there is no God. 
It is a neat metaphysical evasion, but the others 
are momentarily silenced. Wasjka has boasted 
that he fears neither life nor death. Anna 
quietly dies while the rest are gabbling, and 
instantly a hush pervades the sordid scene. 
Dead! What does that mean? A moment 
ago querulously begging for quiet — now quiet 
forever ! The young criminal edges his way up- 
stairs, his bragging spirit clean gone. Dead ! 
Some one must run to the tavern and tell the 
husband. The police must be informed; the 
sooner the better for the man's sake. He might 
be suspected! The curtain falls on a moving 
spectacle. 

Another case in which Luka interferes is that 
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ICONOCLASTS 

of the old actor. We gather from this abject 
wreck's disconnected speeches that he has been 
a dramatic artist in his time ; but, as he repeats, 
parrot-fashion, he "has poisoned his organism 
with alcohol." He picked up the phrase from 
the doctor at the poorhouse infirmary. This 
caricature of humanity, this wraith with a brill- 
iant past, has drifted into the back waters of 
' the night refuge and there awaits death. One 
gleam of light he is made to see before the end. 
Luka tells him of a city which contains a hospital 
for the cure of drunkenness. There must the 
actor go and there begin a new life. A new 
life ! The words ravish his ears stunned by 
debauchery and wake a momentary vista of 
hope. Where is this city ? Luka cannot tell. 
He has forgotten, but he will surely remember. 
The actor later relates to the cynical street-walker 
the good news. His brain stimulated by the in- 
trusion of a new idea stirs to life. He quotes, 
misquotes, Shakespeare; recalls bits of Lear, 
and breaks down in recitation. The word, the 
word — what is it ? Exalted he waves his arms 
wildly and rushes out to the haven of rest, the 
tavern. When the dead woman is surrounded 
by the speechless crowd, the old actor comes in, 
mounts a table, and declaims his speech. He 
has remembered. The effect is ghastly. 

Luka has conversations with the baron. This 

odd bundle of bones lives on the young woman 

already mentioned. If he can't get vodka, he 

will drink drugs; these failing he will sit and 

280 



MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL 

gnaw his nails as a mouse gnaws the wires of its 
cage, or he will sit cross-legged for hours on the 
top of the Russian stove and listen to story-tell- 
ing. His catchword is " talk on " ; anything for 
an anecdote. He mocks continually the woman 
who supports him. She is an inveterate senti- 
mentalist, and every day tells a story about a 
student of noble birth who once threatened to 
shoot himself for love of her. But, as the baron 
sarcastically points out, the name of this imagi- 
nary hero is Gaston one day, another it is Raoul. 
He taunts the poor devil into despair and drunk- 
enness. Luka expostulates. He touches the 
spring that sets working the young man's recol- 
lections of a happy and honourable past. He 
was the son of a wealthy, noble family. He had 
his coffee in bed in the morning — yes, it is true ! 
He had servants, horses, a wife. Why was he 
born ? No idea ! Why did he marry ? No idea ! 
Why is he still living ? No idea ! Why will he 
die? 

Then the woman has her revenge. It is her 
chance, and she takes it. She sneers at the 
baron's lies. He take his coffee in bed ! Not 
he. Liar he is when he boasts of his birth. 
Vagabond! The episode is as ugly as if it 
happened under our eyes. His secret weak- 
ness exposed, the baron breaks into hysterical 
weeping, which presently modulates into fierce 
anger. Seizing a glass, he attempts to hurl it 
at her head. But the storm subsides, and soon 
they are all drinking and shouting. You feel as 
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ICONOCLASTS 

if you had been viewing the scene from a hidden 
window, so realistic is the performance by the 
troupe of the Kleines Theatre. 

The climax is attained in the third act. A 
row is precipitated during which the lodging- 
house keeper is killed. Who struck the blow? 
Loudly his widow denounces Wasjka. He is 
the murderer of her husband, he the thief who 
threatened so often the life of her good man. In 
the confusion the police rush in, Wasjka is man- 
acled ; but so is the woman, for Natascha bears 
witness that she overheard her sister plotting the 
death of her husband with her lover, Wasjka. 
The moment is as theatrically thrilling as you 
please ; hate has the upper hand in Natascha's 
heart and her evidence sends the pair to prison. 
She disappears. 

About this time you begin to suspect that the 
well-meaning Luka is a trouble-breeder. Every 
pie in which he has put his finger so far is spoiled. 
He, too, vanishes as noiselessly as he appeared. 
In Act IV what is left of the gang sits at the 
same old dingy table drinking and discussing, 
interminably discussing, the events of the past, 
and also Luka. He is branded as a liar, a bore, 
a kill-joy, a busybody, and one who causes trouble. 
What if he lies or tells the truth ? What's the 
difference, anyhow ? His truth caused murder, 
his lies did no one good, and so they sneer, sneer 
at the world, sneer at themselves, occasionally, 
Pilate-like, asking, what is truth? The Tartar 
prays in a corner and reads his Koran, the rest 
282 



MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL 

yell out a drunken song, the shoemaker plays 
his concertina. The old actor, worse sot than 
ever, asks the Tartar to pray for him, goes out 
to the yard, and hangs himself. The baron dis- 
covers the swinging body and announces the 
fact to his comrades. One answers wrathfully, 
"So he must spoil our singing — the fool!" 
And with that the curtain drops, leaving you 
puzzled, disgusted, shocked, yet touched. Gorky 
has caught something of " the strange, irregular 
rhythm of life " in this piece, and you feel the 
vibration of truth in every line of the extremely 
plastic dialogue. That the stage has, or has not, 
any business with such spectacles never occurs to 
the spectator until out upon Berlin's broad avenue 
of trees pulsing with life. 

The amateur of sensations, exquisite, morbid, 
or brutal, must feel after Nachtasyl that the bot- 
tomless pit has been almost plumbed. What 
further exploitation of woe, of crime, of hu- 
manity stripped of its adventitious social trap- 
pings, can be made ? And this question is put 
by every generation without in the least stop- 
ping the fresh shaking up of the dramatic kalei- 
doscope. The Gorky play, even if it disgusts 
at times, at least arouses pity and terror, and 
thus, according to the classical formula, purges 
the minds of its spectators. Compared to the 
drama of lubricity manufactured in Paris and 
annually exported to America, this little study 
of a group of outcast men and women is a 
powerful moral lesson. That it is a play I do 
283 



ICONOCLASTS 

not assert, nor could it be put on the boards 
in America without a storm of critical and pub- 
lic censure. Americans go to the theatre to be 
amused and not to have their nerves assaulted. 
Thackeray, in a memorable passage of Vanity 
Fair, refused to stir those depths of humanity 
where lurk all manners of evil monsters. Per- 
haps this refusal was for the great writer an 
artistic renunciation ; perhaps he knew the Brit- 
ish public. In our own happy, sun-smitten land, 
where poverty and vice abound not, where the 
tramp is only a creation of the comic journals — 
in America, if such a truth-teller as Gorky arose, 
we should fall upon him, neck and crop, gag 
him, and without bothering over the formality 
of a writ de lunatico inquirendo, clap the fellow 
behind the bars of a madhouse cell. It would 
serve him right. The ugly cancers of the social 
system should never be exposed, especially by 
a candid hand ! In art, to tell truths of this 
kind does not alone shame the devil, but out- 
rages the community. No wonder Emperor 
William does not grace such performances by 
his presence. No wonder Gorky is a suspect in 
Russia. He tells the truth, which in the twen- 
tieth century is more dangerous than hammering 
dynamite ! 

One detail I have forgotten. Old Luka the 
Pilgrim is asked by Wasjka Pepel where he 
purposes travelling after he leaves their haunt. 
To Little Russia, he says, adding that he has 
heard of a new faith being preached out there, 
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MAXIM GORKY'S NACHTASYL 

and he will see if there is anything in it. There 
might be — men search and search for better 
things. ... If God will but give them pa- 
tience, all will be well ! Perhaps this new 
preacher has found the light! It is a touch 
unmistakably of Russia, where even the irreli- 
gious are not without faith. Gorky, with all his 
moral anarchy, is as superstitious as a moujik. 
He shakes his fists at the eternal stars and then 
makes the sign of the cross. It may be for that 
reason he wrote The Night Refuge. 
De profundis ad te clamavi / 



wi 



VIII 

HERMANN SUDERMANN 

The unfailing brilliancy of expression and 
abundant technical power of Hermann Suder- 
mann have so seldom failed him in the lengthy 
list of his plays and novels that his admirers 
are too often oblivious to his main defect as 
an artist and thinker — a dualism of style and 
ideas. The Prussian playwright wishes to wear 
three heron feathers in his cap. Cosmopolitan 
as he is, he would fill his dramas with the in- 
comparable psychologic content of Ibsen ; he 
would be a painter of manners; he would emu- 
late Sardou in his constructive genius. To have 
failed, and failed more than once, in his effort to 
precipitate these three qualities in his surpris- 
ingly bold and delicate wit, is not strange. And 
to have grazed so often the edge of triumphs, 
not popular but genuinely artistic, warrants one 
in placing Sudermann high in the ranks of 
German dramaturgists. 

In a very favourable review written by Mr. 
W. S. Lilly of The Joy of Life, he ranks 
Sudermann among the great painters of man- 
ners, and, after reading Dame Care and The 
Cat's Bridge, we are tempted to agree with 
286 



HERMANN SUDERMANN 

the enthusiasm of the English critic. He thus 
sets down the qualities of a painter of manners : 
" Sense and sensibility, sagacity and suppleness, 
openness of mind and originality of thought 
depth of feeling and delicacy of touch." Does 
Sudermann's art include all these things ? We 
think not. Rather is he as a dramatist — the 
expert Techniker, the man of the theatre, im- 
pregnated by the dominant intellectual ideas of 
the hour, than a poet who from a haunting 
necessity gazes into his heart and then writes : 
Sudermann is too photographic ; he too often 
wills his characters into a mould of his own, not 
of their own, making; he wills his atmosphere 
to blend with his theses, the reverse of Haupt- 
mann's method. He is more cerebral than emo- 
tional, more of a philosopher than a dramatic 
psychologist. Above all, he is literary ; he has 
the literary touch, the formal sense, the up- 
gushing gift of verbal expression. Add to this 
order of talent a real feeling for dramatic nuance, 
and Sudermann's enigmatic warring opposites 
of temperament and action seem remarkable. 

In 1889, miraculous year of modern artistic 
Germany, Sudermann's dramatic debut in Hon- 
our was more of a nine days' wonder than 
Hauptmann's Before Sunrise. The surety of 
touch, the easy mastery of theatric effects, the 
violent contrasts, and the sparkling dialogue 
transformed Sudermann's cometary career into 
a fixed star of the first magnitude. To-day this 
first play appears banal enough. Time has per 
287 



ICONOCLASTS 

mitted us to see it in completer historic perspec- 
tive. Ibsen's influence in the posing of the moral 
conflict is speedily recognized, just as Count Von 
Trast may be traced to those raisonneurs so dear 
to the younger Dumas, those human machines 
spouting logic and arranging the denouement 
like the god behind the cloud. One inevitably 
recalls the relation of Bjornsen to Ibsen in the 
present position of Sudermann and Hauptmann. 

Yet it is easy to admire Honour. It contains, 
notably in the two acts of the "hinter haus," real 
strokes of observation and profound knowledge 
of human nature. The elder Heinecke, rapacious 
rascal, is a father lost to all sense of shame, for he 
closes his eyes to his daughter's behaviour. This 
same old scamp is both true and amusing. Nor 
is his wife depicted with less unwavering fidelity. 
The motive of Honour is not alone the ironic 
contrast of real and conventional ideals of honour 
— it shoots a bolt toward Nietzsche's land where 
good and evil blend in one hazy hue. Suder- 
mann, here and in nearly all his later pieces, 
challenges the moral law — Ibsen's loftiest heron 
feather — and if any appreciable theory of con- 
duct is to be deduced from his works, it is that 
the moral law must submit to the variations of 
time and place, even though its infraction spells 
sin, even though the individual in his thirst for 
self-seeking smashes the slate of morality and 
perishes in the attempt 

This battle of good: and evil Sudermann 
dwells upon, often to the confusion of moral 
288 



HERMANN SUDERMANN 

values, often to the tarnishing of his art. And 
in his endeavour to hold the dramatic scales in 
strict equipoise, to intrude no personal judg- 
ments, he leaves his audiences in blank bewilder- 
ment. Better the rankest affirmations than the 
blandest negatives. Yes counts far more than 
No in the theatre, and Sudermann is happier 
when he is violently partisan. His contempo- 
rary, Hauptmann, shows us the shipwreck of 
souls in whom the spiritual stress preponderates. 
Sudermann, except in rare instances, sticks closer 
to the social scale and its problems ; and when 
he does he is at his best, for it cannot be said 
that The Three Heron Feathers, written under 
the spur of The Sunken Bell, betrays a mas- 
tery or even a familiarity with those shadowy 
recesses wherein action is a becoming, where 
the soul blossoms from a shapeless mass into 
volitional consciousness. Sudermann's art is 
more external ; it concerns itself with the How 
rather than with the Why, and one feels that 
storm and fury were deliberate engraftments, 
not the power which works from within to the 
outer world. 

There is character drawing of an unexcep- 
tional kind in Honour. Robert Heinecke re- 
turns from foreign lands to find his family 
degraded, his sister trading on her beauty, his 
father and mother accepting bounty from the 
mansion house, the employers of the honourable 
son. The maze in which he is caught is con- 
structed with infinite skill; the expository act 
289 



ICONOCLASTS 

is the best. There is not much mystery — we 
seem here to be in the clear atmosphere of the 
French dramaturgists, Augier and Dumas ; while 
the finale is rather flat, we look for a suicide 
or a scandal of some sort. The author keeps 
himself steady in the saddle of realism. This 
ending is lifelike, inasmuch as the hero goes 
away with Graf Trast, who literally reasons him 
out of his dangerous mood. We feel that all 
the rest do not count, not the ignoble Kurt and 
his snobbish friends, his philistine parents ; not 
the Heineckes with their vulgar avarice, their 
Zola-istic squalor. The romance is conventional. 
In fact, so cleverly did Sudermann mingle the 
new and old in the opposing currents of dramatic 
art that his play was instantly a success. 

Accused of this ambition to drive two horses, 
the dramatist threw down as a gauge to criti- 
cism, Sodom (1891). It was not a great play, 
because it lacked logic, balance, truthfulness. A 
distorted picture of artistic degeneracy, its satire 
on certain circles in Berlin caused a furore ; but 
the piece had not the elements of sincerity. 
Technically it revealed the mastery of almost 
hopeless material, and while one's aesthetic sense 
and the fitness of things are hopelessly upset, 
the cunning hand of the prestidigitator is every- 
where present. There are some episodes that 
stir, notably the scenes between father and son ; 
but the grimness and sordidness are too much 
for the nerves. 

Magda (1893) struck a new note. Man}/ 
200 



HERMANN SUDERMANN 

Delieve it to be Sudermann at his best. Thus 
far he has not surpassed it in unity of atmosphere 
and dissection of motives. That the morale may 
be all wrong is not to the point. Again we see 
Ibsen's mighty shadow in the revolt of the new 
against the old ; daughter and father posed an- 
tagonistically with the figure of the pastor, one 
of the German author's better creations, as a 
mediating principle. 

One of many reasons that the Magda of Suder- 
mann is a remarkable play is the critical con- 
troversy over its interpretation. Each one of us 
reveals his temperamental bias in the upholding 
of Bernhardt's or Duse's or Modjeska's respec- 
tive readings. And which one of the three ar- 
tists has exhausted the possibilities of Magda's 
many-sided character? On this point Herr 
Sudermann is distressingly discreet, although 
he has a preference for Duse, as is well known 
to a few of his intimates. The reason is simple. 
Duse presents more phases of the character, ex- 
hibits more facets of this curious dramatic gem, 
and by her excellences, and not her limitations, 
we must judge her performance. 

We have seen a dozen Magdas : English, 
French, German, Italian, Belgian, Jewish, and 
Scandinavian. Fanatical admirers of Bernhardt 
claim preeminence for her in the part, certain 
sides of which are child's play for her accom- 
plished virtuosity. But the critic who knows 
Sudermann' s Magda also knows that the very 
brilliancy of the glorious French actress throws 
291 



ICONOCLASTS 

the picture into too high relief; there are no 
middle tints in Sarah's embodiment. It recalls 
the playing of an overmasteringly brilliant pian- 
ist, one who rolls over the keyboard like a 
destructive avalanche. The human note, the 
sobbing, undulating quality of a violoncello 
whose tone flashes fire, is missing. Little doubt 
that Bernhardt gives us certain moods of Magda 
in a transcendental manner. She is the supreme 
artist of all in the exposition of tragic bravura. 
Yet she is not Sudermann's Magda. This is so 
well known as to be a critical commonplace. 

Mrs. Campbell's Magda is above the ordinary. 
Modjeska's powers were on the wane when she 
appeared in the play ; but we cannot forget the 
native sweetness and true Polish zal with which 
she suffused the character. Supple, poetic, 
charming, she was, and despite all, lacked much 
of Magda's complexity. Does Duse entirely 
fulfil all the requirements of the role ? 

We do not know. We only feel that in 
mood- versatility she outstrips all others we have 
seen, and if she has not seen farthest into the 
soul of the opera singer, she has viewed it from 
more sides than her contemporaries. Hence 
her interpretation is more various and, it being 
Duse, is more wonderful in the technical sense 
in the revelation of an effortless art. 

She is natural, never photographic. Photog- 
raphy arrests motion ; Duse is ever in modula- 
tion. Rather, if you will have pictorial analogues, 
might her Magda be compared to a Richard 
292 



HERMANN SUDERMANN 

Earlom or a Valentine Green mezzotint, wherein 
the luminous shadows and faint spiritual over- 
tones are acidly mellow. And who shall forget 
the manner of her throat as it trilled with rage 

v when to her Von Keller makes his perfectly- 
honourable and perfectly abominable offer! 
We have dwelt so much upon the admirable 
reticences of this artist, upon her " tact of omis- 
sion," we really forget that she never stops 
acting or living her part for a moment. She 
continually evokes musical imagery, for the ex- 
quisite and harmonious interrelations of every 
movement, every word, unroll before us like 
great, solemn music. 

Magda will probably outlive The Joy of 
Life, as it has already outlived the dramatist's 
Honour. The theme of the first is based on 
more fundamental facts than the others — the 
clash of will and affection. If all human fami- 
lies were loving, if father never opposed daugh- 
ter or son flouted mother, then such a play as 
Magda never would have been written. But, 
alas! the newspapers prove that family life is 

V not always celestial, indeed, that it is often 
bestial. But the Parson Tickletexts never ac- 

1 knowledge this. 

There is no lesson in Magda; the ending is 
not a sermon — unless you wish it to prove that 
contradicting apoplectic fathers is a fatal pro- 
ceeding. Magda is an individualist. She is 
selfish. This trait she shares with the mass of 
mankind. Her " I am I " is neither a procla- 
293 



ICONOCLASTS 

mation nor a challenge to the world. It is the 
simple confession of a woman who knows her- 
self, her weaknesses, her errors, who has battled 
and wrested from life a little, passing triumph, 
the stability of which she doubts. 

"We must sin if we wish to grow. To be- 
come greater than our sins is worth more than 
all the purity you preach." Is this immoral? 
We hasten to quote a sentence from John Mil- 
ton's Areopagitica, the magnificent music of 
which fascinated the ear of Robert Louis Ste- 
venson, quite apart from its significant wisdom. 

" I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered 
virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never 
sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out 
of the race where that immortal garland is to be 
run for, not without dust or heat." Poor Mag- 
da's virtue was certainly not cloistered. She 
ran for fame's garland in all the dust and heat 
of the artistic arena. She won, she lost. The 
bigot discerns in Magda an abandoned crea- 
ture ; the men and women who see life from all 
sides and know the fallibility of the flesh are 
apt to forgive her shortcomings. 

" The ghost of a linen decency yet haunts us." 
She must have had a detestable disposition. 
Fancy what a spoilt opera singer with sore tonsils 
can be on a rainy day, especially when she reads 
the name of her dearest foe " substituting" on the 
bill. Then drop her in the sleepy old town of her 
nativity, where a harsh, opinionated father would 
worm from her every detail of her dubious past. 
294 



HERMANN SUDERMANN 

Sudermann has done this with the result — a 
lifelike play, in which nothing is demonstrated 
except the unalterable stupidity of things in 
general and the naked fact that " I am I " is 
the only motto, whether secret or published, of 
every human crawling 'twixt earth and sky. In 
the pastor Sudermann attempts to paint the 
altruist in action. It is hardly a convincing 
piece of portraiture. Your true altruist is 
bounded by Tolstoy on the north, by Howells 
on the west, by Francis of Assisi on the south, 
and on the east by Buddha. Outside of book 
covers the person exists not. 

The Battle of the Butterflies (1894) was seen 
in New York at Conried's Irving Place Theatre. 
It is comedy of a skin-deep variety, entertain- 
ing ! And here's an end to it. Happiness in 
a Corner is deeper in sentiment. It has the 
Ibsen touch with a pathos foreign to the Nor- 
wegian. Inspector Orb is of Ibsen, so is Pastor 
Weidemann, and the others — Bettina, Racknitz, 
Elizabeth, and Helena — are alive and suffer and 
joy. There is vitality in this work. Also is 
there force and consummate cleverness in the 
three one-act plays grouped under the title 
Morituri ( 1 896). Avowedly devoted to the theme 
of death they are all three illustrative of the 
dramatist's feeling for the right phrase, the 
only right situation. Teja, Fritzchen, and The 
Eternal Masculine show us in three widely dif- 
fering modes how, as in life, we miss the hap- 
piness near at hand while longing for the ideal — 
295 



ICONOCLASTS 

a theme dealt with more broadly in The Three 
Heron Feathers. 

John the Baptist (1898), like Paul Heyse's 
Mary Magdalen, was the occasion of a scandal 
in Berlin, because the censor forbade its per- 
formance on religious grounds, though Otto 
Ludwig's Maccabees and Hebbel's Judith are 
stock pieces. As a drama it is weak, for the 
vacillating hero wearies us to distraction, not- 
withstanding the poetic charm of the prologue. 
If the Christ had been boldly dramatized, as was 
evidently the playwright's purpose, the outcome, 
no matter how shattering to pious nerves, would 
have been better artistically. But this vague 
dreamer, pessimistic, halting, irresolute, what 
can we make of him across the footlights, and 
for once Sudermann's technical ability failed 
him. 

The Three Heron Feathers (1899) is an at- 
tempt to meet Hauptmann on equal terms. It 
lacks coherence, despite the occasional lift of 
its verse — Sudermann fancied that he had 
forsworn the prose of the realistic drama for- 
ever — while the lofty moral ideal, unduly 
insisted upon, soon becomes a thorn in the 
flesii. No one is alive but the trusty Lorbuss, 
the Prince being a theory set in action. The 
next play, St. John's Fire (1900), we confess to 
having read with more pleasure than seeing it 
enacted. It goes up in the air soon after the 
curtain rises on Act III, though the story is 
a capital one for dramatic purposes. It would 
296 



HERMANN SUDERMANN 

seem that Sudermann was again attacked by 
his doubting mania. He has contrived the 
atmosphere of romance, the pagan fire of St. 
John, the mystery of night, the passion of 
Georg and Marikke; but either his courage 
failed him, or else beset by some idea of resig- 
nation he spoilt his development and conclusion, 
and we leave the theatre dissatisfied, not with 
that spiritual dissatisfaction which Ibsen plants, 
a rankling sore in one's heart, but the kind that 
grows into resentment against the dramatist, for 
Marikke is a girl of whom Thomas Hardy 
would have been proud. And then there is a 
muddle of symbolism and heredity, — Sudermann 
endeavouring to scoop up in his too comprehen- 
sive net the floating ideas of the hour. Georg 
von Hartwig's sudden lapse into a selfish citizen 
we can never forgive. 

Of the criticism of masterpieces there is no 
end. Take Sudermann's The Joy of Life 
as an example. (Why such an Ibsen-like title 
for Es Lebe das Leben?) Obsessed by subject 
and subject-matter only, many of us turn a 
blind side to the real qualities that make up 
an excellent play. Now this harping on the 
theme of a drama — whether pleasant, unpleas- 
ant, dull, brilliant, or truthful — is eminently 
amateurish. It is rather the function of the 
manager ; it affects his box-office, and, as he is 
not in business for art, he cherishes that brave 
little place above all else. But a critic is sup- 
posed to wear an open mind, to accept a subject 
297 



ICONOCLASTS 

without looking the gift poet in the mouth, and 
also to judge how near the dramatist reaches the 
goal of his own ideal — not the critic's. That 
we do not do so is to be pitied. It is because 
of this that so many wonderful plays never see 
the light, or else are botched at their birth. 

This persistent avoidance of the dramatist's 
viewpoint, this refusal to enter into sympathetic 
complicity with him, leads to sad conclusions. 
If you decide violently that a play has no right 
to exist because it exhibits a situation or char- 
acter abhorrent to your notions, in what a pre- 
dicament is the dramatist ! It recalls the story 
told by George Saintsbury about the man who 
was shown Flameng's beautiful etching of 
Herrera's Child with the Guitar. " But I don't 
like babies," said the man, unconsciously illus- 
trating uncatholicity in criticism. The subject 
did not appeal to him, therefore its truthful art 
could go hang. 

Too great an artist to preach a moral, Su- 
dermann nevertheless bestows the justice de- 
manded by destiny upon the luckless Beata, 
Countess of Michael von Kellinghausen. The 
Joy of Life is next to Magda technically one of 
Sudermann's biggest achievements. 

To present such a trite theme with new har- 
monies is a triumph. The tragic quality of the 
piece in an atmosphere bordering on the aris- 
tocratic commonplace is not the least of its 
excellences. We know that life is daily, that 
great art is rare, that the average sensual man 
298 



HERMANN SUDERMANN 

prefers a variety show to a problem play ; yet 
we are not abashed or downcast. The cant 
that clusters about cults, theatric or artistic, 
should not close our ears to the psychologic 
power and the message — if you will have the 
word — of this Sudermann play. If his Beata, 
— Ibsen has a Beata in Rosmersholm and 
D'Annunzio one in his La Gioconda — was a 
sorely beset woman, if she felt too much, 
thought too much, — one suspects her of poring 
over Nietzsche and hearing much Wagner ; wit- 
ness that allusion to Hans Sachs's quotation 
from Tristan, — yet is she not a fascinating 
soul? Are there to be no semitones in char- 
acter? Must women be paragons and men 
perfect for inclusion in a play? If this be so, 
then all the art of the Elizabethans is false, 
their magnificent freedom and their wit a 
beacon of warning to pure-minded playwriters. 
And, pray, out of what material shall the dram- 
atist weave his pattern of good and evil ? 

But had Sudermann transposed his Beata 
to the fourteenth century, had he dowered her 
with mediaeval speech and the name of Beatrice, 
had he surrounded her with lovers in tin-plate 
armour, our shrinking natures might not have 
hied to cover. The pathos of distance would 
have softened the ugly truths of the modern 
drawing-room. The Joy of Life is a cap- 
ital play. There is much conventionality dis- 
played in the minor characters ; only Beata 
and Richard are really original. And the use 
299 



ICONOCLASTS 

of the divorce debate as a symbol reveals the 
real weakness of the play, though structurally 
it has some striking virtues. The small part of 
Meixner, the theological student turned social- 
democrat, had vraisemblance. It suggests the 
character of Krogstad in A Doll's House. That 
tiresome exhorter, Count Trast, in Sudermann's 
Honour, is luckily not duplicated. And we doubt 
not that the absence of explicatory comment by 
the author is disheartening to a public which 
likes all the questions raised answered at the 
close, after the manner of a Mother Goose mo- 
rality. Neither D'Annunzio nor Sudermann is a 
preacher. As in the ghastly illumination of a 
lightning flash, souls hallucinated by love, terror, 
pity, despair, are seen struggling in the black 
gulf of night. And then all becomes abysmal 
darkness. There are the eternal verities, the 
inevitable compensations in this play. The 
application of the moral is left to the listener, 
who is given the choice of echoing or not echo- 
ing the immortal exclamation of Mr. Saints- 
bury's unknown, " But I don't like babies ! " 

In Storm-Brother Socrates, Sudermann places 
his scene in a small East Prussian town, possibly 
Matizken, where he was born in 1857. The 
schoolmaster, the grocer, the Jewish rabbi, the 
tax-collector, and the dentist are the chief char- 
acters of this satiric comedy. A lot of old cro- 
nies, men who went through the stirring times 
of '48, form a revolutionary guild, calling them- 
selves "The Brotherhood of the Storm." Harm- 
300 



HERMANN SUDERMANN 

less enough, they still declaim against Bismarck 
— the time of action is twenty years ago — and 
talk of their warlike exploits. As the dramatist 
is preeminently a painter of manners, many of 
his portraits are masterly. The dentist, Hart- 
mayer, is a hater of tyranny and an idealist. 
He has assumed the name of Socrates, his com- 
panions selecting such stirring pseudonyms as 
Catiline, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, and Ponia- 
towski. This dentist's son Fritz has adopted 
the same profession ; and being called to attend 
a reigning prince's dog for toothache, he is 
denounced by his anti-imperialist of a father. 
But Fritz is a socialist and has no prejudices on 
the subject of canine gums. Another brother, 
an impudent lad, is a conservative. When the 
archives of the Bund fall into the hands of the 
local magistrate, the old man is thoroughly mis- 
erable. His associates fly and he, expecting 
arrest, is decorated for the services of his son 
in saving an aristocratic dog's teeth ! He 
accepts, and the curtain falls on a rather dis- 
cursive, ill-natured comedy. However, Suder- 
mann's virtuosity has plenty of opportunity for 
display. 

The minor characters are well sketched. The 
waitress, Ida, is an exceedingly vital figure, as is 
the innkeeper. The dialogue is Sudermann almost 
at his best, — witty, sarcastic, ironical, tersely 
vigorous, and true to life. Like Daudet and 
Flaubert, Sudermann loves to prick the bloated 
German bourgeois. There is a little Hebrew, 
301 



ICONOCLASTS 

named, from sheer cruelty, Siegfried Markuse. 
His description of his freshman visits to a Corps- 
Kneipe at the Kbnigsberg University is a fair 
example of the playwright's powers of unerring 
observation. 

"Just as soon as I gave my name," relates 
Siegfried, "the man across the table began to 
crack jokes on Jews. I play the naive and 
keep the game going. Then you should have 
heard them snicker. I see plainly enough that 
they are laughing at me, but I clench my teeth 
and say to myself, ' You are going to compel me to 
respect your superior intellect. . . .' I talked 
about everything, — old idealism and modern 
gaiters ; Germany's inalienable national rights 
and the swellest way of training poodles; the 
unimportance of Hegel's conception of divinity 
and the importance of a good pug dog. I quoted 
Plato, Schopenhauer, and the latest sharper. 
Everybody looked at me with mouth agape, and 
I thought I had them just where I wanted them 
when my friend Hartmayer came and whispered 
that he was commissioned to give me a hint that 
this was no place for my colossal jaw, and that 
it would be better if I stayed away next time. 
Outside I shook my fist and swore : ' If you won't 
have us as friends, you will have us as enemies ! 
Then we shall see who comes out on top.' " 

Mr. Lilly sees in Sudermann an affinity with 

Euripides, which may mean that he is a painter 

of a society in its decadence. His affinities as 

pointed out seem to be Parisian ; at least he is 

5^2 



HERMANN SUDKRMANN 

Parisian in his gift of observation and style, Ger- 
man as is his power of reasoning. He is un- 
moral, following the tendenz of his time, but 
not so completely as D' Annunzio, who is satis- 
fied with sheer shapes of beauty. With Suder- 
mann it is, first, technical prowess, secondly, 
social satire, and he is always brilliant if not 
always satisfying. 



?o3 



IX 

PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY 

A. S. A. I. Madame la princesse Mathilde, 

sonnet improvise 

sur des rimes donnees sur un sujet choisi 

LA VERANDAH 

Sous cette verandah, peinte en vert d'esperance, 

On arrive et Ton part avec un souvenir 

Si doux, qu'on y voudrait aussitot revenir 

Sous les fleurs des tropiques et les plantes de France. 

Une main de deesse y gudrit la souffrance, 
Au merite modeste elle ouvre Tavenir. 
Elle sait couronner comme elle sait punir. 
Pour le ge"nie elle est pleine de deference. 

Devant elle enhardi, l'esprit prime-sautier, 
Ainsi qu'Euphorion dansant sur la prairie, 
Peut, entre terre et del, se montrer tout entier. 

Pour que son ceil pdtille et que sa levre rie 
Et que de toute humeur sa levre soit gue'rie, 
II suffit d'un bon mot de son bouffon Gautier. 

— Theophile Gautier. 

The late Princess Mathilde Bonaparte meant 
many things to many people. Her ancestry, 
her marriage to Prince Demidoff, her political 
power at the Tuileries, her sympathetic patron- 
age of artistic folk, her personal beauty, love 
204 



PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY • 

affairs, and feminine caprices — all these serve the 
world as pleasing material for anecdotes. The 
Princess was fond of the theatre, and fonder still 
of z. premiere when the play was written by one 
of her intimate circle. She was surrounded by 
a distinguished group of poets, painters, drama- 
tists, novelists, and diplomats. De Morny called 
her "the man of the family." She was good 
to gaze upon, and she had intellect. After the 
death of Sainte-Beuve, the publication of her 
correspondence with that celebrated critic gave 
us a portrait of his friend. It occurs in Lettres 
de la Princesse : — 

" The Princess has a high, noble forehead, and 
her light golden hair, leaving uncovered on each 
side broad, pure temples, is bound in wavy 
masses on the full, finely shaped neck. Her 
eyes, which are well set, are expressive rather 
than large, gleam with the affection of the thought 
of the moment, and are not of those which can 
either feign or conceal. The whole face indicates 
nobleness and dignity, and, as soon as it lights 
up, grace united to power, frankness, and good- 
ness; sometimes, also, it expresses fire and ardour. 
The head, so finely poised and carried with such 
dignity, rises from a dazzling and magnificent 
bust, and is joined to shoulders of statuesque 
smoothness and perfection." 

That description should cover a multitude of 

indiscretions, such as the publication of the 

letters. She had already given Taine his conge 1 

for his criticism of Napoleon in the Revue des 

305 



ICONOCLASTS 

Deux Mondes. She was the daughter of Jerome 
and Caroline of Wiirttemberg and was as proud 
as Napoleon. She never forgave an offence, 
and Taine's conception of the First Consul as a 
superior bandit closed her doors upon him. 

She stood with forced equanimity the first two 
of his masterly studies ; at the third she exclaimed 
with true feminine finesse of cruelty : — 

" Ah, I know what I shall do ! I owe Mme. 
Taine a call. I shall leave my card with P. P. C, 
which will mean that I take leave of him forever. 
I cannot allow a friend to attack violently the 
head of my family, the man without whom I 
should perhaps be nothing but a little orange- 
vender on the bridge at Ajaccio." She put her 
threat into execution. Taine, shocked by the 
rupture, called on Renan. After hearing the 
tale without any comment but a sweet, ironical 
smile, Renan answered : — 

" Cher ami, I have quarrelled with a much 
greater lady than the Princess Mathilde." 

" With whom, then ? " 

" The Church," answered Renan, dryly. 

Mathilde did not respect rank more than genius. 
She set her face against the free and easy 
democratic manners, and because of this dis- 
liked the American invasion — few of our 
countrymen crossed her doors. One night 
Edmond About was invited to her house, and 
during the trying moments before dinner he 
amused her with his wit. Suddenly the Count 
Nieuwerkerke appeared. " Go away," cried 
306 



PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY 

the novelist, " and let us be alone, you jealous 
fellow." The Princess arose, rang, and in- 
structed the servant : " Conduct M. About to 
his carriage. He is not dining here to-night." 
And the man of the Broken Ear went away, his 
temper much ruffled. 

In 1847 tne Princess settled in Paris per- 
manently. She had been divorced from the 
handsome, profligate Demidoff, and her allow- 
ance, a big one, had been given her by a decree 
from the Czar. Over Napoleon III she wielded 
great influence. Of him the De Goncourts 
said, " The Emperor would be an excellent 
somnambulist if only he had intervals of lu- 
cidity ; " while Flaubert declared him to be 
clever because, knowing his ignorance, he had 
the wisdom to hold his tongue. The Empress 
Eugenie was always jealous of Mathilde's 
power with her imperial cousin. That she was 
at the latter's funeral is an illustration of life's 
topsy-turvy tricks. Eugenie was jealous also of 
the Castiglione, and the De Goncourts do not fail 
to register Constance's spiritual mot about the 
Emperor. 

" If I had only resisted, to-day I should have 
been an Empress ! " 

This recalls the delightful answer made by 
Alfred de Musset to a famous actress of the 
Theatre Francais — is it necessary to give the 
name ? Once the lady had said : — 

" Monsieur de Musset, I hear you have 
boasted of being my lover." "I beg your 
307 



ICONOCLASTS 

pardon," answered the friend of Rachel and 
George Sand ; " I have always boasted to the 
contrary." 

The rupture of Mathilde Bonaparte and 
Sainte-Beuve took place in 1869. The brothers 
De Goncourt heard its details from the Princess. 
They found her still trembling from the stormy 
interview. " I shall never see him again — 
never again ! I, who fell out with the Empress 
on his account ! . . . He has gone over to the 
Temps, our personal enemies ! Ah ! I said to 
him, ■ Monsieur Sainte-Beuve, listen ! I am 
sorry you did not die last year, for I should 
then have mourned a friend.' " 

She must have been difficult at times. She 
had a good opinion of her birth, wealth, posi- 
tion, and beauty. "Yes, I had a peculiar and 
most extraordinary complexion. I remember 
in Switzerland, when I was fourteen, they put a 
Bengal rose leaf on my cheek, and were unable 
to distinguish between the two." 

On one occasion, when Edmond de Goncourt 
was openly rude to her at her Chateau Saint- 
Gratien, she, with her guests, sat stupefied. 
Later he apologized, tears in his eyes — he was 
a gallant, handsome gentleman — and he re- 
lates most ingenuously, " Suddenly she put her 
arms around me and kissed me on each cheek, 
saying, ' Of course I forgive you — you know 
how truly attached I am to you ; I also, of late, 
have felt quite nervous and upset.' " 

It was this passage that caused Henry James 
308 



PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY 

to shiver ; not because of the fact, but the lack of 
tact. The De Gon courts were taken up by the 
Princess in 1862. Jules, the younger brother, 
died in 1870, literally killed by his devotion to 
literary art. The chiselling of the De Goncourt 
phrases was deadly to brain and body. It is 
little wonder that their novels, one after the 
other, until Germinie Lacerteux appeared, should 
have been indifferently received. As Alphonse 
Daudet, ever receptive and tender in his judg- 
ments of original work, wrote : " Novels such 
as had never been seen before; novels that 
were neither moulded upon Balzac nor diluted 
from George Sand, but novels made up of pic- 
tures, . . . with plot scarcely indicated, and 
great blanks between the chapters ; real break- 
neck ditches for the bourgeois reader. To this 
add an entirely new style, full of surprises — a 
style from which all conventionality is banished, 
and which, by a studied originality of phrase and 
image, forbids any commonplace in the thought; 
and then the bewildering boldness, the perpetual 
uncoupling of words accustomed to march to- 
gether like oxen dragging a plough, the earnest 
care in selection, the horror of saying all and 
anything ; considering this, how can one be 
astonished that the De Goncourts were not 
immediately greeted by the applause of the 
common herd ? " 

The mystery of it is, Why should the De Gon- 
courts have cared for the applause of that same 
bourgeois public they so despised, reviled, and 
309 



ICONOCLASTS 

held up to mockery in their books ? Gautier, 
Zola, Daudet, had to work like galley slaves for 
a living ; the two brothers and Flaubert were 
rich, as riches go with literary men ; why, then, 
did they care whether they were popular or 
not ? Was it because they were human, notwith- 
standing their theories of impassibility, perfec- 
tion, and art for art's sake ? 

The Chateau Saint-Gratien was the Princess 
Mathilde's country home until her death. There 
she entertained, as entertained George Sand at 
Nohant, all her friends. Until his death, in 
1896, Edmond de Goncourt was her privileged 
visitor. The work of the two brothers in eigh- 
teenth-century chronicles amused and interested 
her, especially their minute histories of such 
actresses as Du Barry, Sophie Arnold; and, 
earlier, great women like Mme. de Pompadour, 
the Duchess of Chateauroux ; great painters, 
Watteau, Boucher, Latour, Greuze, Lancret, 
Fragonard ; and stage favourites such as Mes- 
dames Saint Huberty, Clairon, and La Guimard. 

The brothers introduced Japanese art into 
France. They were amateurs of the exquisite. 
Their house at Auteuil was truly " la maison d'un 
artiste au XIX siecle." And consider the labour, 
acute, agonizing, and enormous, involved in the 
writing and production of their novels : Germinie, 
Madame Gervaisais, Ren£e Mauperin, ^Manette 
Salomon (which was the first novel of studio life, 
excepting Fromentin's Domenique, in France, 
and one that influenced Zola greatly in his 
310 



PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY 

L'CEuvre and De Maupassant in his Strong as 
Death), Charles Demailly — a wonderful study 
of journalism in Paris, a true continuation of 
Balzac's Lucien Rubempre ; Sceur Philomene ; 
and, written by Edmond after the death of 
Jules, La Fille Elisa, Les Freres Zemganno, La 
Faustin, and Cherie. In addition, there are the 
nine volumes of the journal, a study of Gavarni, 
the master caricaturist ; vaudevilles, pantomimes, 
letters, portraits, several plays, histories, Etudes, 
an early novel En 18 — , and miscellany amount- 
ing in all to over forty volumes. Yet this fra- 
ternal pair, because of their wealth and birth, 
are still contemptuously alluded to as " amateurs." 
Yes, amateurs, indeed, in the fullest sense of a 
misinterpreted word, amateurs of beautiful sen- 
sations, amateurs in their devotion to an ideal 
hopeless of attainment, amateurs who might 
well be patterned after in this age of hasty pro- 
duction, vulgar appeal to the sentimental, to the 
cheap and obvious. Aristocrats were the De 
Goncourts, yet their white fingers never faltered 
when they held the burin and engraved in in- 
delible letters that first great naturalistic novel, 
Germinie Lacerteux, the tale of an unhappy 
servant. 

Even their friend De Monselet pronounced it 
" sculptured slime," and, to the curiously inclined, 
interesting are the critiques of Brunetiere ; of 
Barbey D'Aurevilley — who hacked away at 
everybody on general principles ; of Renee 
Doumic, who always follows the lead of Bru- 
3H 



ICONOCLAS1S 

netiere; of Maurice Spronck, who declaied that 
the brothers were victims of a malady known 
to psycho-physiologists as Audition coloree. But 
there were fairer critics. The studies of Zola, 
Daudet, Henri Ceard, Paul Bourget, Henry 
James, Emile Hennequin, the friendly words 
of Turgenev, that gentle Russian giant, the valu- 
able suggestions of Flaubert — these were balm 
to the sensitive nature of Edmond de Goncourt. 
He lived to head a school — hitherto rather 
sterile, it must be confessed — and before his 
death he dowered an academy. (Ah, if all 
French literary men had but a moiety of 
Daudet's humour in the matter of academies ! ) 

But the contribution of the De Goncourts to 
the novel will be lasting. They have one cele- 
brated disciple, Karl Joris Huysmans, who be- 
gan under their influence and has traced for 
himself over the " great highway so deeply dug 
out by Zola ... a parallel path in the air by 
which we may reach the Beyond and Afterward, 
to achieve thus, in one word, a spiritualistic 
naturalism." In the last analysis Huysmans 
is an artistic stepson of the epileptic Dostoi- 
evsky, greatest of all psychologists ; and while 
he may have forgotten it, his first artistic spring- 
board was the De Goncourts. 

What Henrietta Marechal accomplished de- 
spite its failure, was in the dialogue — modern, 
picturesque, and of the best style for the stage, 
because it set forth the particular turn of mind 
of each talker; and it was also the first attack 
312 



PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY 

on that stronghold of French dramatic tradition, 
the monotonous semi-chanting of the conserva- 
toire-taught actor. Here was an elastic, natural 
dialogue, charged with turns of phrases taken 
up from the sidewalk, neologisms, slang — in a 
word, lifelike talk as opposed to the old stilted 
verbiage. 

The play was a failure, of course, as we shall 
see, for extraneous reasons. The director of 
the Theatre Francais, M. Edouard Thierry, put 
it on, and after the sixth performance, during 
all of which the actors never heard their own 
voices because of the organized popular tumult, 
the play was withdrawn. On its publication in 
book form it sold better than its author's novels — 
a fact Zola notes with his accustomed scent for 
the perversity of mankind. 

Yet, as Daudet declared, Henrietta Marshal 
was throughout " a fine, bold, and novel produc- 
tion. And a short time after, the same people 
who had hooted it frantically applauded Heloise 
Paranquet and the Supplice d'une Femme, plays 
of rapid action going straight to their issue, 
like a train at full speed, and of which . . . 
Henrietta Marechal was the inspiration. And 
was not the first act, taking place in the opera 
ball, with its crowd, its abusive chaff, its masks 
joking and howling in pursuit of each other, that 
close approach to life and reality, ironic and 
real as a Gavarni sketch — was it not ' natural- 
ism ' on the stage fifteen years before the word 
1 naturalism ' was invented ? " 
313 



ICONOCLASTS 

Daudet, with characteristic delicacy and fidel- 
ity to the theme, elsewhere describes a read- 
ing at Edmond de Goncourt's house of his Les 
Freres Zemganno — those fraternal heroes of 
the sawdust. 

When the play was read to the members of 
the Comedie Franchise, Minister Rouher — who 
afterward distinguished himself so terribly in 
the Franco-Prussian War ! — suggested to the 
trembling authors that the valiant girl, who as- 
sumes her mother's guilt and is shot dead by 
her enraged father, be wounded only, and marry 
her mother's lover ! Charming, is it not ? The 
suggestion was frowned down by Marshal Vail- 
lant, an old soldier, who did not fear the smell 
of stage powder. 

Written in 1863, Henrietta Marshal was not 
produced until December 5, 1865, at the Comedie 
Frangaise, and after its speedy withdrawal it 
was not revived until March 3, 1885, at the 
Od6on. In the preface to the De Goncourts' 
Theatre, Edmond wrote of the painful struggles 
the pair endured to obtain a hearing. They 
composed a vaudeville, Sans Titre, which was 
not heard, and followed this by other attempts, 
during which they slowly attained some know- 
ledge of dramatic construction, and in 1867 fol- 
lowed Henrietta Marechal with a five-act prose 
drama called La Patrie en Danger. This was 
also read at the Franchise, in 1868, admired, 
and dropped. Edmond declared it superior to 
its predecessor. It deals with the epoch of the 
314 



PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY 

French Revolution, and need not concern us 
now. 

Of interest is his declaration that in the novel 
he is a realist (he is really a modified roman- 
tic, with a romantic vocabulary, selecting for 
subjects modern themes); but in the drama he 
totally disagrees with Zola and his naturalistic 
formulas as applied to the theatre. They have 
dug up a letter he sent over a decade ago to 
M. Lothar, who made the German translation 
of La Faustin. It all is to be found in this 
preface of 1879. De Goncourt, who naturally 
ranks the drama below the novel as literature, 
upholds the conventions of the former. The 
drama is by its nature romantic and limited in 
scope. The monologues, asides, denouements, 
sympathetic characters, and the rest must always 
endure. He does think, however, that reality 
•may be brought nearer, and that literary lan- 
guage should give place to a style which will 
reveal the irregularity and abruptness of vital 
conversation. In this latter particular he has 
been a benefactor. Unnatural theatrical dia- 
logue he slew with his supple, free, naturally 
coloured speech in Henrietta Marechal. Stage 
talk should be, De Goncourt asserted, flowing 
and idiomatic — never bookish. The ball scene 
in Henrietta proves that the brothers could 
practise as well as preach. 

It is a mistake, too, to think that their novels 
and plays are immoral or hinge always on the 
eternal triangle. Various passions are treated 

315 



ICONOCLASTS 

by them in their air-tight receiver ; their meth- 
ods of psychological evisceration recall the 
laboratory of an analytical chemist. In Ger- 
minie it is the degradation of a woman through 
weakness ; in Madame Gervasais — that Odyssey 
of a woman's soul — it is the mystic passion for 
religion ; in Manette Salomon, art and woman 
and their dangers to the impressionable artistic 
temperament; Charles Demailly pictures the 
gulfs of despair into which the literary, the 
poetic soul may be plunged ; Sceur Philomene 
shows the combat between religious vows and 
nature ; and so on through a wide gamut. And 
these two nervous artists have been mockingly 
called maniacs, their work has been derided 
as inutile — that work which practically recon- 
structed the artistic life of the eighteenth cen- 
tury and discovered to itself the artistic soul of 
the nineteenth. If they had remained normal 
units of their class, they would have gambled, 
shot pigeons, sported mistresses, and dabbled 
in racing, drinking, and the other sterilities of 
fashionable life. They preferred art, and they 
were rewarded in the usual fashion. The sin- 
gular thing is that they expected, ingenuous 
souls, encouragement from their world. Fame 
came only when Jules was dead and Edmond 
too old and embittered to appreciate it. The 
survivor saw his ideas appropriated by Zola 
and the younger crowd, and cheapened and 
coarsened beyond all likeness to the original. 
What, then, must have been the dismay and 
3i6 



PRINCESS MATHlLDE'S PLAY 

perplexity of the brothers when they heard the 
hissing, catcalls, groans, and yells of an organ- 
ized clique sworn to kill Henriette Marechal ? 
The body of the house was not hostile ; but poli- 
tics, the Republican opposition to the patronage 
of the Bonapartes, aroused students on the other 
side of the Seine, and a scandalous scene, only 
equalled by the Parisian productions of Hernani 
and Tannhauser, occurred. Strangely enough, 
Theophile Gautier, who had figured in the Her- 
nani fracas, had written the prologue to Henri- 
etta Marechal, and spoke it without opposition 
from the malcontents, though he was the libra- 
rian of Princess Mathilde. Not a word could 
be heard in any of the scenes, and when Got, 
the comedian who played in the cast, — the rest 
were Delaunay, the Lafontaines, Arnould-Plessis, 
Bressant, and other distinguished artists, — ap- 
peared to announce, as was the custom, the 
authors' names, he stood for ten minutes unable 
to make himself heard in the terrific hubbub. 
The Journal of the brothers contains a minute 
account of the affair, and of their terror as they 
stood, pale, breathless, peeping out upon a dis- 
ordered sea of human faces. After all, it is a 
joy, despite its frequent injustice, to see a com- 
munity take its drama seriously and not merely 
as a first aid to digestion. 

The De Goncourts had the satisfaction a few 
weeks later to hear Moliere's Precieuses Ridi- 
cules hissed by the same mob believing that it 
was Henrietta Marechal. 
317 



ICONOCLASTS 

Reading this play to-day one can see that its 
novelties must have provoked hostility, though 
such critics as Jules Janin, Gautier, Sarcey, Uhl- 
bach, Nestor Roqueplan, Paul de Saint- Victor, 
and others wrote impartial and enthusiastic criti- 
cisms. The middle-aged woman who loves a 
young man was not pleasing upon the boards, 
and her daughter's death at the pistol of her 
father caused a shudder; for it was the rank 
side of adultery exhibited without that pleasing 
gloze of sentiment so dear to the average Gallic 
playwright and public. Naturally politics caused 
the row, for Princess Mathilde had steered the 
play into the notice of M. Thierry. The speeches 
are too long and the action moves languidly. 
Perhaps, after he had surveyed the situation in 
a calmer mood, Edmond de Goncourt was im- 
pelled to write his preface espousing the meth- 
ods of Meilhac and Halevy. He said, among 
other acute things, that the avarice in Moliere's 
play, L'Avare, was " l'avarice bouffe " when com- 
pared with the powerful and compelling study 
made by Balzac of Pere Grandet. 

He also records the cynical remark of a well- 
known actress who, after listening to the aesthetic 
blague in a well-known literary group, broke 
forth with this apostrophe, "Vous etes jeunes, 
vous autres, mais le theatre au fond, mes en- 
fants, c'est Tabsinthe du mauvais lieu," and to 
his dying day Edmond de Goncourt called the 
theatre a place for the exercises of educated 
dogs or an exhibition of marionettes spouting 

3 i8 



PRINCESS MATHILDE'S PLAY 

their tirades. Between these extremes he 
thought there was a place where artistic spirit 
might be displayed in a dignified and beautiful 
style. But he never found that place, despite 
his poignant finale, when Henrietta declares that 
her mother's lover is her own. 

Contrast this effective, if too heroic, denoue- 
ment with the cold cynicism of Maurice Donnay 
in L' Autre Danger, where a pure girl is forced 
by cruel circumstances to hear her mother's 
shame published, to learn the awful news that 
the man she loves is the lover of her mother, 
and, to cap this assault upon our nerves, the 
lover is made to marry the wretched girl so as 
to divert suspicion from the inhuman mother. 

In the grip of his dark pessimism Edmond 
de Goncourt predicted that in fifty years the 
book would kill the theatre. It was about nine 
years later that Ernest Renan, according to 
Octave Uzanne, said one evening in conversa- 
tion among friends, " Fifty years hence no one 
will open a book." Both prophecies are likely 
to come to naught. Bad books, bad plays, we 
shall always have with us. Life seems too brief 
for the larger cultivation of beautiful art. 



319 



X 

DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 



Eleonora Duse! 

When this extraordinary woman first came 
to New York in January, 1893, she attracted 
a small band of admirable lunatics who saw 
her uncritically as a symbol rather than as an 
actress. Some of us went to fantastic lengths in 
our devotion. She was Our Lady of Evil, one 
of Baudelaire's enigmatic women ; Mater Malo- 
rium, a figure out of De Quincey's opium-stained 
dreams ; she was not only superior to Sarah of 
the Sardou regime, but the true successor to 
Rachel. This semi-absurd jumbling of Poe, 
Swinburne, Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans — 
what a tremendous Duchess of Main we fancied 
Duse would make ! — was not altogether the 
fabric of fantasy. Nor was personality the 
strongest asset in her art. She had suffered 
academic training ; she had practised when 
young all the scales of thumb-rule theatricalism ; 
she had played Cosette when a child and knew 
Electra. The apprenticeship then had been 
exhausting, the thirty-six situations she had by 
320 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

heart, a long race of play acton, dete* mined 
her vocation, and yet she rose superior to all 
these things, to experiences that would have 
either crushed or made mechanical the aver- 
age artist. Life with its disillusionments was 
the sculptor that finally wrought the something 
precious and strange we recognize in Eleonora 
Duse. 

Without especial comeliness, without the 
golden ductile voice of Bernhardt, Duse so 
drilled her bodily organs that her gestures, 
angular if executed by another, become potent 
instruments ; her voice, once rather thin, siccant, 
now gives a soft, surprised speech ; and her face 
is the mirror of her soul. Across it flit the ago- 
nies, the joys, of the modern anaemic, overwrought 
woman. She excels in the delineation of listless, 
nervous, hysterical, and half-mad souls. She 
passes easily from the passionate creatures 
of Dumas and Sardou to the chillier-blooded 
women of Ibsen and Sudermann, unbalanced 
and out of tune with their surroundings. Shall 
we ever forget her reading of Vladimir's letter 
in Fedora? And yet her assumption of the 
Russian was a tour-de-force of technic; tem- 
peramentally the role belongs to the hotter- 
tongued Bernhardt. With Santuzza, a primitive 
nature, she accomplished wonders. That mis- 
erable, deserted girl, in a lowly Sicilian village, 
with her qualms of conscience, her nausea, 
her hunted looks — here was Verga's heroine 
stripped of all Mascagni's rustling music, the 
321 



ICONOCLASTS 

soul showing clear and naked against the sordid 
background of Cavalleria Rusticana. 

The slinking ferocity of Cesarine's entrance 
into her husband's atelier ; the scene with An- 
tonine ; the interview of Camille with Armand's 
father; the gracious gayety of Goldoni's La 
Locandiera; that hideous battle of an exas- 
perated man and woman before the closed doors 
in Fernande ; Magda's wonderful blush as she 
meets Kellar, the cold-hearted prig, who ruined 
her — all these stale situations and well-worn 
types, Magda being an honourable exception, 
Duse literally re-created. In them we felt the 
power of her intellect, the magic of the woman. 
And she stared tradition in the face by refus- 
ing to " make up," unconcealing her own hair 
and doing nothing to restrict the plasticity of her 
figure. Now she wears wigs, uses rouge dis- 
creetly, for her hair is gray and her face more 
matured. But her art is b~cader, though losing 
none of its former subtlety. There is more 
weight, more brilliancy, in her action and gesture, 
and that doubtless prompted some critics to com- 
pare her to Sarah Bernhardt. But she is still 
Eleonora Duse, the woman with the imagination, 
the glance, and the beautiful hands. 

The wisdom of her choice in selecting only 
D'Annunzio's dramas is not altogether apparent. 
She will listen to no advice ; perhaps she is on 
a mission ; perhaps she wishes to make known 
everywhere the genius of her young country- 
man, and to go back with the means to raise 
322 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

upon the border of Lake Albano a great inde- 
pendent theatre, the poet's dream of a dramatic 
Bayreuth. The D'Annunzio plays are not of 
the kind that appeal to the larger public. For 
the student of contemporary drama they are of 
surpassing interest in their freedom from con- 
ventional stage trickery and characterization; 
La Gioconda, La Citta Morta, are really lyric 
masterpieces in little, though many will wince 
at the themes, at their bold development and 
treatment. When floated on the wings of Rich- 
ard Wagner's mighty music in Die Walkiire, 
the incestuous loves of Siegmund and Sieglinde 
are applauded ; prose, be it as polished and as 
sonorous as D'Annunzio's, has not the same 
privilege as music. So the motto of Catulle 
Mendes for a playhouse has a point, "Aban- 
don all reality ye who would enter here." And 
D'Annunzio never falters before harsh reality, 
as those who have read his romances well 
know. In each of his plays we assist at the 
toilette of a woman's soul. 

Duse's art, however, covers a multitude of 
D'Annunzio's morbidities — everything that does 
not derive from bread and butter, children in 
arms, politics, dog-shows and gowns, is adjudged 
morbid by a world that feeds on divorce scan- 
dals, crimes of the day, and the diversions of 
multi-millionnaires. D'Annunzio, who does not 
pretend to be a mere painter of manners, is 
given over entirely to the portraying of the 
primary passions. This Swinburne of Italy 
323 



ICONOCLASTS 

became famous in his sixteenth year (he was 
born in 1864, and his real name is said to be 
Gaetano Rapagnetto). Since then he has suc- 
ceeded the poet Carducci in the affections of a 
certain public, though his poetic ancestry may 
be easily traced to Shelley, Baudelaire, Carducci, 
and Stecchetti. From verse he passed to prose, 
writing in a highly coloured, fluid style a group 
of novels called The Romances of the Rose, 
Lily, and Pomegranate. The Triumph of Death 
is the best known to English and American 
readers, though Fuoco — The Flame of Life 
— set wagging the tongues of the curious by 
its carefully exposed portraits of a celebrated 
Italian actress and D'Annunzio himself. In 
that astonishing performance, the taste of which 
can be hardly gauged by any but Latin stand- 
ards, one of the D'Annunzio plays — The Dead 
City — is set forth in detail. Whether the 
betrayal of a woman's soul — for D'Annunzio 
is a true soul-hunter — was made with the con- 
currence of the subject, no one seems to know. 
Of the psychologic value of the study there can 
be but one opinion. It is unique, it is painful, 
it is appallingly true. D'Annunzio now enjoys 
a European reputation. His art, despite its ex- 
quisite workmanship, is still a gallery of echoes. 
He has absorbed all contemporary culture, and 
so chiselled is his prose that he has been called 
"the Italian Flaubert." A profound student 
of the classics, he is rich in his scholarly allu- 
sions. The late Pope is said to have delighted 
324 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

in the melodious thunder-pool of his style. 
From Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Bourget, Daudet, 
Maeterlinck, Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky he has 
absorbed much ; while he evidently knows the 
English classics. Some of his dramatic figures 
seem to have stepped out of John Webster or 
John Ford's pages. In his short tales, Novelle 
della Pescara, he has utilized a number of De 
Maupassant's themes, in an individual manner; 
but the assimilation is complete. Compare La 
Ficelle and Foire de Candea — the transposition 
of character and place are most deftly accom- 
plished, as a writer in the Mercure de France 
has shown. That D'Annunzio has chosen to 
depict decadent men and women, and all bris- 
tling with vitality, is his personal idiosyncrasy. 
His chief defect is an absolute lack of humour, 
and this, coupled with the tropical quality of his 
art, causes a certain monotony — we breathe a 
dense, languorous atmosphere. Human interest 
in the daily sense of the phrase is often absent. 
He loves nature. He describes her lovingly. 
His formal sense is exquisite ; yet too much lit- 
erature often kills the humanity of his charac- 
ters. And he is always more lyric than dramatic. 
"Gabriele d'Annunzio," writes M. Huret, "is 
of medium height, slender, not to say frail, with 
short, reddish hair which is growing thin on the 
top of his finely shaped head, and this he 
brushes straight back at the temples ; his back 
already somewhat bent, he has the air of one 
of those aristocratic beings who have begun life 
325 



ICONOCLASTS 

too soon. His ruddy mustache is trimmed close 
to the lip, and the points are turned up sharply 
at the corners, while the chin ends in a little 
pointed beard. The nose is regular and shows 
strength ; the division between the nostrils ex- 
tends below in a prominent lobe. His eyes, of 
pale blue, like a faded violet, are half veiled by 
his heavy lids. Beneath these eyes the net- 
work of fine lines tells the story of precocious 
weariness. The finely shaped mouth opens 
widely in a smile over carefully tended teeth. 
And one may search in vain in that face for 
any trace of the overwhelming, almost savage, 
sensuality which his privileged hero manifests 
in all his novels. The appearance of his physi- 
ognomy as a whole is rather self-contained and 
cold. He is a thinker, assuredly quite master 
of himself, much more given to enthusiasm over 
a beautiful verse than capable of a real emotion 
over another's grief. Besides, has he not writ- 
ten, * One must keep one's liberty complete at 
any cost, even in intoxication' ? " 

D'Annunzio has ever been a spoiled darling 
of the Muses. At the age of sixteen, after he 
had published that turbulently erotic book of 
verse, Primo Vere, Marc Monnier, the critic, 
wrote of him in the Revue Suisse, " If I were 
one of his masters I should give him a medal 
and the stick." 

It is to be hoped that with increasing age and 
experience he will pierce beneath the vesture of 
things and seek for the message spiritual. He 
326 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

is now the poet of the fleshly, albeit an inter- 
preter of its beauties. The poet in him cele- 
brates the joy of living, the joys of love, of 
death, — oh, he can pipe you many sweet lays 
of Death the Triumpher ! — of wine, of art. He 
has just begun to write for the stage, and is 
unduly preoccupied with the sumptuousness of 
externals, with the bravery of words, with the 
torturing complexities of character. 

II 

Gabriele d'Annunzio's La Gioconda is a four- 
act tragedy of power, beauty, and horror. De- 
spite the reputation of the poet-dramatist and his 
undeniable qualities of copious invention, skilful 
characterization, and prime literary ability, this 
piece was not warmly received in Italy. Its 
unrelieved analysis, its slowly accumulating bur- 
den of misery, and the cruelty of the climax do 
not allure the average listener. And the poet 
in D' Annunzio shows at every line — there are 
many gorgeous ones spoken in La Gioconda. 

Duse possesses the subtle hands of that paint- 
er's Lisa Gioconda, and as the motive of D'An- 
nunzio's play springs from a pair of hands — its 
original title was The Tragedy of the Beautiful 
Hands — SignoraDuse makes of her fingers ten 
eloquent signals. 

The opportunity for theatric climax is rare in 

La Gioconda ; but when it does come the effect 

is strong. A wife, whose love and devotion are 

slighted, dares to face her rival in the studio of 

327 



ICONOCLASTS 

the sculptor-husband. He has endeavoured des- 
perately to wean himself from his passion for 
the model who posed as his masterpiece, a 
Sphinx. Attempted suicide before the action 
of the play proved how deeply sunk in his im- 
agination is this crazy infatuation. His wife 
meets the woman, who is young, beautiful, 
strange, and absolutely enamoured of the sculp- 
tor. Of her sincerity there is no doubt. Then 
the dramatist throws wire-drawn analysis to the 
winds and in a scene of peculiar brutality the 
women duel for the possession of the gifted, 
worthless man. 

Here Duse's imagination and technic are 
revealed. She must remain the refined woman, 
though her brain is afire, her soul up in arms. 
In acrid terms of reproach and irony she defies 
the temptress of her husband, knowing full well 
that he is lost to her ; in the very flush of defeat 
she would pluck victory by the sleeve. Startled 
by the ready assurance, enraged by the seem- 
ingly triumphant wife, Gioconda, the model, 
rushes into the atelier, bent upon destroying 
her counterfeit in clay, — that figure she so lov- 
ingly guarded during the sculptor's illness. 

She had watched the work of his soul, while 
his wife nursed only his sick body. With this 
she taunts the other. In despair before the 
looming catastrophe, Duse, the wife, cries that 
she has lied, that her husband still loves his 
model. But it is too late. The struggle of 
the women is heard. A crash and a scream 
328 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

announce that the statue has been overthrown. 
Then an ugly Sardou motive is obtruded. 

With the shadow of eternal regret in her 
eyes, her hands wrapped in the wet cloths that 
bound the clay, Duse staggers from behind the 
draperies of the atelier. She has saved her hus- 
band's statue, but her beautiful hands are hope- 
lessly maimed. This scene is hideously cruel. 
And to top the crescendo of woe, the vacillating 
man runs in. " You, you, you ! " sobs his wife ; 
" it is saved," and the curtain blots the agoniz- 
ing situation from our eye, not from our memory. 

The play might be truthfully called The Tri- 
umph of Art, for, if it poses any problem at all, 
it is this : What will an artist, a sensuous, weak 
decadent, do when confronted by the choice of 
relinquishing his wife or his mistress ? The 
latter is surpassingly beautiful, and, as he tells 
his friend, the painter, in Act I, she is his sole 
inspiration, the guiding pillar of flame for his 
art. " She has a thousand statues in her," in 
that marvellous body that "is like a look." He 
loves his wife, too, but she does not reveal to 
him his entire creative self. She is a staff to 
lean upon, not an electric impulse in his life. 
To the everyday observer all this seems a vari- 
ation of an old story. Lucio is tired of Silvia, 
his wife, and dazzles himself with the sophis- 
tries of art — base sensuality being the real 
reason for his behaviour. 

But this supposition is only a half-truth, 
Lucio has a species of accursed temperament 
329 



ICONOCLASTS 

that needs must feed upon the exquisite surfaces 
of beautiful things. He is a true artist of medi- 
aeval times, loving colour and form for their 
own sake ; art for art is his motto, as it was 
Benvenuto Cellini's, as it was George Eliot's 
Tito Melemo. Lucio's most eloquent speech 
describes the appeal Gioconda makes to his 
artistic nature, the creative ardour she arouses. 
This speech is of much significance. 

Despicable as is the man, — and we never 
doubt his ultimate desertion of his wife, — there 
is no denying the grim truth with which he is 
depicted. That he is not sympathetic is hardly 
our affair. It is bad art to preach, and that 
D'Annunzio never does. He simply sets before 
us, with consummate address, a few episodes in 
the life of an unhappy family, leaving us to 
draw our own inferences. His men and women 
are genuinely alive, and, given their various 
temperaments, they act as they inevitably would 
in the world of the living. 

The character of the wife, Silvia, is beautiful 
despite the dissonance of the fatal untruth she 
utters. Without mawkish sentimentality, she 
divines the eternal child that is the basis of 
every artist, and so she forgives her husband. 
As portrayed by Duse, one feels that lurking in 
the sanctuary of her innermost being there is 
the sad, bitter suspicion that her sacrifice will 
be in vain. 

But she stops not to count the cost, and, at 
the end of Act I, when the emotional, weak- 
330 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

spined fellow, touched by her sacrifice, casts 
himself sobbing at her knees, her great heart 
surrenders, and she pets and pities him. The 
exquisite tenderness, soft credulity, and sup- 
pressed sweetness of Duse here sound like a 
strain of marvellous music. The chords of 
human sympathy sing melodiously. And her 
every movement has the actuality of life. 

After the third act any dramatist would have 
cried quits. Not so D' Annunzio. He wishes to 
tell us that Silvia is deserted forever. Pathos, 
poetic in its quality, contrasts with the horror of 
the preceding scene. We are shown Silvia at 
the seaside, her crushed hands concealed. To 
her comes La Sirenetta, an elfin creature of the 
sea, a tiny, fantastic fisher maid, who sings the 
delightful ballad of the Seven Sisters and con- 
soles the sorrowful wife and mother. Yes, 
Silvia has a daughter, Beata, who is kept in 
ignorance of her mother's misfortune. 

It is now that the spectator feels the remorse- 
less grip of the poet. La Sirenetta offers a star- 
fish to Silvia and wonders why she does not 
accept it. She is the solitary shaft of sunshine 
in the play. Beata runs in with flowers for her 
mother. It is a poignant touch. The chilly 
indifference of the dramatist to the suffering 
of his characters, his complete detachment, is 
art of a rarefied sort, though not the art that 
will endear him to all. " Beata ! " exclaims the 
poor mother, making a futile gesture with her 
mutilated arms. "You are crying! You are 
331 



ICONOCLASTS 

crying ! " sobs the child, throwing herself upon 
her mother's breast. The flowers slip to earth. 

A trait of Duse is the stifling of her tears 
when her sister visits her. She involuntarily 
lifts her arms, and then, checking herself with 
an indescribable movement, she rests her face 
upon her sister's shoulder. There the tears fall. 
There she dries them. It is characteristic Duse. 
Her entire assumption is on the plane of 
exalted realism. We know that Silvia has a 
beautiful, strong soul, that she succumbs to the 
awful pressure of temptation ; and the lie she 
tells is henceforth a memory never lifted from 
her life. In a measure she accepts with resig- 
nation physical torture and loss of her husband. 
D'Annunzio has not before created such a noble 
woman. Lucio is only a variant of his typical 
man : George Aurispa, Andrea Sperelli, and the 
rest of his amateurs in corruption and artistic 
hunters of morbid sensation. Silvia is unique. 
Silvia is adorable as Duse presents her. Through- 
out this most human among actresses is in con- 
stant modulation ; her very silence is pregnant 
with suggestion. She is the exponent of an art 
that is baffling in its coincidence with nature. 
From nature what secret accents has this Italian 
woman not overheard ? — secrets that she em- 
bodies in her art. 

There are many beauties in the play, beauties 

of style, though the dialogue in the early acts 

is in excess of the movement. This is quite in 

consonance with continental ideas of playwriting 

332 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

In Europe the art of elocution is not a lost one, 
as it is on the English stage. The Italians and 
the French often speak for the sheer beauty of 
their expressive tongues. So the action halts 
and there are some amateurish strokes betrayed 
in the bringing on of his characters by D'Annun- 
zio. But the burning rhetoric of the young poet 
lends fascination to several scenes — notably 
the interview of painter and sculptor in Act II. 
His brother-poet, Arthur Symons, has Englished 
D'Annunzio's prose and has accomplished his 
task with rare distinction. 



Ill 

D'Annunzio's Francesca da Rimini is glorified 
melodrama. It is unnecessary to revert to the 
plays, poems, books, pictures, symphonies, that 
have been made with the unhappy loves of 
Francesca and Paolo as a theme. From the 
day when the great Florentine exile sang in 
Canto V of his Hell, " In its leaves that day 
we read no more," Dante inspired painters, 
poets, sculptors, — Rodin not among the least, — 
musicians, and playwrights. Leigh Hunt wrote 
The Story of Rimini ; there is George Boker's 
commonplace play, in which Lawrence Barrett, 
Louis James, Otis Skinner, and others have 
appeared ; there is an old play by Silvio Pellico, 
and the two new settings of the story by Stephen 
Phillips and Marion Crawford — the latter' s ver- 
sion prepared for Sarah Bernhardt — are of yes 
333 



ICONOCLASTS 

terday's doings. Both Liszt and Tschai'kowsky 
have composed symphonic poems on the sub- 
ject. 

And now D'Annunzio, as if he wished to 
demonstrate his fitness in the handling of any 
dramatic form, conceived and executed a species 
of poetic melodrama in which the life of a feudal 
period is unrolled before us in five glowing 
tableaux. Prodigality of colour, bloody war, 
horrid lusts, are mingled artistically with the pro- 
cessional attitudes of tirewomen, sweet singing, 
and interludes of lyric passion. As in a mirrored 
dream of Burne-Jones, Francesca moves slowly 
from rapt maidenhood to forced marriage ; from 
unhappy marriage to deception and death. Not 
content to follow the bare lines of the ancient 
chronicle, the playwright weaves into his sym- 
phony of adulterous passion historic episodes 
and pictures of manners. It is one epoch of 
strange, repellent contrasts. Souls are danced 
to the tune of graceful madrigals, and roses 
often dyed a deeper hue by blood. In the 
sphere of action the play mostly lives, though 
there are some halting moments of poetic deli- 
cacy and introspection set over against operatic 
episodes. We first assist at a scene of jester and 
damsels which recalls Bandello or Boccaccio. 
It is gay and humorous, with the coarse, un- 
seemly humour of the time. Alberich, teased by 
the three mermaids in Rheingold, is recalled. 
Two brothers of Francesca indulge in fierce 
recriminations during which a veiled accusation 
334 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

of attempted parricide is made, with the result 
that murder is barely escaped. 

Francesca is deliberately betrayed by her 
brother, Ostasio Polenta, into the arms of the 
" Lamester " Giovanni Malatesta. She believes 
that she is wedding his brother Paolo, called the 
handsome one, skilled in the fine arts, of goodly 
presence, a warrior and a lover of sport. By a 
device near the close of Act I he is made to 
pass and be seen by Francesca. She goes to 
her doom willingly. She loves, but does not 
know that Paolo is a married man. 

In the second act, a year later, Francesca, in a 
Saracenic headdress, seems to have aged ten 
years. On the battlement of her husband's 
fortress, amid the enginery of war, Greek fire 
boiling in the caldron, darts flaming, missiles, 
catapults, ballista, and outlandish weapons that 
crowd the summit of the tower, she stands. 
There is a terrific din ; crossbows twang, shout- 
ings and tocsins are heard. Francesca, display- 
ing true mediaeval immobility at all these sights 
and sounds, hovers about the platform, ques- 
tioning, curious. 

She insists on tampering with a torch of the 
deadly Greek fire, and it evokes from the poet a 
flock of his flaming images that Swinburne alone 
might parallel. As Paolo enters, eager for the 
fight, Francesca's attitude shifts. At once we 
see her aroused interest. She loved him, loves 
him. Their interview contains some striking 
speeches. "And thjen J saw your face- silent 
33* 



ICONOCLASTS 

between the spears of the horsemen," she tells 
him, and adds that then she longed for death. 
He replies in a like exalted strain. He exposes 
himself at the open portcullis, and she trembles 
but is brave. 

Her Pater Noster is an outlet for her over- 
charged feelings. It was delivered by Duse 
with shivering eloquence. The intensity of the 
scene is heightened by the entrance of her hus- 
band, surnamed Gianciotto. He limps, but is a 
mighty warrior in the land. The characters of 
the two brothers are exposed in a few lines. 
Still another brother appears, Malatestino. He 
is the youngest. His eye has just been de- 
stroyed during this battle. Malevolent, cruel, 
he too loves Francesca. In a later act he plays 
the part of Iago to his elder brother. 

Act III is in the earlier half both a pic- 
ture and a promise. Little happens. We see 
Francesca in a rare room, with the Adriatic Sea 
glimpsed through the open windows. This scene 
is beautifully presented. Upon a unique lectern 
is placed a tome, The History of Launcelot of the 
Lake, the very book mentioned by Dante as the 
fatal one. There are girlish jesting and chatter- 
ing. Francesca reads aloud. It may be no- 
ticed that at the beginning of Act I the old 
romance of Tristan and Isolde is alluded to, 
thus suggesting the ultimate ending of Francesca 
and Paolo. 

Throughout there are these delicate loops of 
fading motives binding firmly the somewhat 
336 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

loosely built dramatic tale. Francesca relates 
her dream to her slave, Smaragdi. It is of a 
pursuit through dim woods of a naked woman 
by a savage knight and his mastiffs. The 
vision always ends in the same manner. The 
knight cuts out her heart and throws it to the 
hungry dogs ; they devour it. 

The entrance of a voluble merchant and 
later an astrologer and the jester relaxes the 
tense melancholy of the love-lorn lady. A 
scene of bright foolery follows. It is touched 
by no little fancy. And then the slave whispers 
that Paolo is without. Sending away her people, 
she receives him. There is the inevitable duo 
of amorous despair and the fateful reading. 
Here D'Annunzio handles a foreseen situation 
with poetic skill. He manages to create an 
atmosphere of suspense from the beginning. 
The final cry of Francesca, " No, Paolo ! " is 
worth a page of overwrought adjectives and 
writhing embraces. 

Act IV, the cruellest of the five, is devoted to 
the arousing of Giovanni's suspicions. This is 
easily accomplished by Malatestino, the wicked 
younger brother. Jealous of Paolo, he shocks 
Francesca with his hints, his hot advances, and 
the hideous cruelty he exhibits in cutting off the 
head of a prisoner. He drags on the stage the 
head, enveloped in a bag. It is heavy, he re- 
marks. Oddly enough, D'Annunzio manages 
matters so that we sympathize with the deceived 
husband — rather an un-Latin proceeding. 
337 



ICONOCLASTS 

In the final act D'Annunzio, we feel, has 
Shakespeare before him. The scene of Othello 
is evoked at once, not in incident, but because 
of the spiritual, tragic atmosphere. Francesca 
is asleep; she moans, for she dreams. Her 
maidens are sent away. Her slave is called, but 
comes not. Tricked by this plotted absence, 
Paolo enters. The lovers are soon caught and 
slain by Giovanni, who breaks his sword across 
his knee. Every detail is admirably managed. 

Not the least potent factor is the absence of 
all remorse shown by Francesca. The victim 
of deceit, she does not hesitate to deceive in 
return. In her love passages, Duse was truthful 
to a degree. She invested Francesca with just 
the proper poise, dignity, and suppressed mel- 
ancholy. 

Francesca da Rimini is the first of D'An- 
nunzio's dramatic efforts that attracted popular 
favour. It is an interesting rather than a great 
play, though full of inspiring poetry. It was 
first given, December 9, 1901, at Teatro Cos- 
tanzi, Rome, by the Duse Company, with the 
exception that Gustavo Salvini was the Paolo on 
that occasion. 

IV 

Compared to La Gioconda, The Dead City is 
a highly polished specimen of the static drama ; 
there is little that is dynamic until the scene 
before the last. And the theme, thunder- 
charged as it is with symbolism, is fitter for 
338 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

reading than for publication before the foot- 
lights. The play is literature first, drama after- 
ward. Sarah Bernhardt produced it in Paris. 

Incest as a subject for dramatic treatment is 
no new thing. The Greeks employed it as a leit- 
motive of horror, and in the CEdipus of Sopho- 
cles, the Hippolytus of Euripides — we recall 
with grateful memories Bernhardt's puissant 
Phedre in Racine's paraphrase of the Greek 
dramatist — and in the Bible itself this dire 
theme may be encountered, though no modern 
has had the courage to set the episode of 
Tamar and Amnon in the Book of Samuel. 
'Later, in the flush of the seventeenth-century 
dramatic renascence, John Ford wrote his mas- 
terpiece, The Brother and Sister. 

In that play, admired of Charles Lamb, is set 
forth with a wealth of realism undreamed of by 
D'Annunzio and the Greeks the details of a 
lamentable passion, and so cunning is the art 
of Ford that we find ourselves pitying the un- 
happy pair, Giovanni and Annabella, poor play- 
things of the gods. Of Wagner's Die Walkiire 
it is unnecessary to speak. Music, as Henry 
James remarks, is a great solvent. 

But mark the handling of the young Italian 
poet. Obsessed by the Greeks, he has con- 
structed his tragedy on antique lines. Crime 
is hinted at ; we even see an adulterous love — 
for evil passions hunt in couples throughout this 
dream-like story — in development ; almost is a 
catastrophe precipitated. The incest, however 
339 



ICONOCLASTS 

is potential. It is only an idea. It scourges 
the two men like whips in the hands of the 
avenging Furies. And it finally dooms an 
innocent creature, hopelessly involving at the 
same time the happiness of three survivors. 

It is then a crime contemplated, not accom- 
plished, this love of a brother for a sister. A 
critic might show that the Italian poet's form is 
a replica of the Greek with several variations ; 
there is a breach of unity of place in the last 
act, and no "false catastrophe " is hinted at in 
the fourth act. This W. F. Apthorp has pointed 
out. It is not the sole departure. Instead of 
presenting us with a frozen imitation of Grecian 
tragedy, like most writers who have attempted 
to cope with the classics, D'Annunzio frankly 
filled the antique mould with modern feeling. 

His men and women are modern ; they are 
of to-day, neurotic, morbid, febrile souls. And 
this modern atmosphere is a jangling dissonance 
to them that prefer their tragedy unadulterated. 
Without an ounce of John Ford's lusty Eliza- 
bethan animalism, D'Annunzio so contrives his 
play of character and shock of incident that we 
are disquieted, dismayed, not so much by the 
theme as by its insidious music. 

With his customary audacity he places his 
action in Greece, on the plain of Argolis ; 
archaeology is the background. Four friends 
are engaged in excavating the dead city of My- 
cenae, where Schliemann discovered, or thought 
he discovered, the tombs and dusty bones of the 
MO 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIQ 

Homeric heroes. From these tainted remains 
is exhaled the moral malaria that sets in action 
D'Annunzio's piece. It is a genuinely original 
and morbid idea. 

The house of the men of Atreus is dug up, 
and from it comes spiritual pollution. Like 
a master of string-quartet writing the author 
has manipulated his four characters so skilfully 
that the melody worked is ever mysterious, ever 
melancholy. Anna is blind ; she is the wife of 
Alessandro, a poet and scholar. Alessandro is 
morally blind, for he loves the younger Bianca, 
the sister of his friend Leonardo. Leonardo, 
the successful explorer and rifler of Homeric 
tombs, loves his own sister, — that ancient poi- 
son working in his veins, — and with this un- 
canny combination D' Annunzio plays his sinister 
tunes, evokes his strange harmonies. 

There is no necessity of disputing the daring 
of this scheme, and just as inutile would be a 
discussion of its ethics. It seems that in his 
three plays, La Gioconda, La Citta Morta, and 
Francesca da Rimini, D'Annunzio has tried 
his 'prentice hand at modern realism, ancient 
tragedy, and historical melodrama. They are 
all three largely experimental, and, it must not 
be forgotten, the works of a beginner. 

It is the externals of the drama with which 
we are more concerned. Of five acts three 
were placed in the loggia of Leonardo's house ; 
Act II is the interior of the same house; 
Act V a fountain not far away. It is then a 
341 



ICONOCLASTS 

soul tragedy that is enacted, and one cannot 
quite escape the feeling that much study of 
Maeterlinck has been responsible for the sullen, 
depressing atmosphere. There is in the dia- 
logue, with its haunting repetitions, the same 
electric apprehension sensed in the Belgian's 
poems. Gestures, movements, the music of 
sonorous speech, slow glances, and pauses — the 
pause is a big factor in Maeterlinck — are woven 
into a sort of incomprehensible symphony. 

Seemingly subordinate, Eleonora Duse is the 
real protagonist. Blind, though not from birth, 
because of her exquisite tactile sensibility she 
understands the love of her husband for her 
friend. An exalted sentiment of renunciation 
prompts her to probe this secret passion, and 
when she discovers that Bianca is languishing, 
too, her mind is made up. She will efface her- 
self. She will slay her useless life, so that two 
souls may thrive in happiness. More than this, 
she tempts her husband with the ripe beauty of 
Bianca. Here is an un-Greek idea at once. It 
is altruism gone mad. From Anna is mercifully 
kept the unholy love of the brother ; nor is it 
revealed to Bianca. Therein lies another devi- 
ation from antique models. A story in classical 
literature is never told obliquely. 

Duse, who has extraordinary powers of in- 
tuition, the logic of her temperament, imper- 
sonated Anna with unvarying truth and veiled 
sweetness, indicating by shades almost too fine 
for the frame of the theatre her mental atti- 
342 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

tudes toward her companions. There are few 
climaxes for her, the part being a passive one, 
the action being buried in the text. But she has 
opportunities. Her cry for " Light ! " is one ; 
and almost at the drop of the last curtain she 
finds her way to the fountain where, lured by 
the brother Alessandro, Bianca, his hapless vic- 
tim, is murdered by being drowned in the mur- 
muring waters which the pair have so often 
watched. 

Anna utters the names in the terrified accents 
of the lost blind. She seeks, too, her husband. 
All the day she anticipated tragedy. It hung 
over her soul like a smoky pall. She feels her 
way to the fountain and there touching with her 
feet the body of the dead girl she distractedly 
searches for signs of life. It is a dramatic mo- 
ment. Then arising with a shudder she shouts, 
joyfully : — 

"Vedo! Vedo!" ("I see! I see!"). Her 
physical sight is restored and her own hold on 
life becomes at once intensified ; her unselfish- 
ness is shed. And it is at this hopeless mo- 
ment that the dramatist unseals her vision and 
closes his play, leaving the wretched woman to 
face the loss of Bianca and possibly the lunacy 
of her husband and his friend. If they do not 
go mad it is because their nerves have become 
dulled to the hideousness of life. They are 
abnormal; every one in the play, excepting 
the girl Bianca, is abnormal. Even the nurse 
does not escape the taint. She is a figure ou* 
343 



ICONOCLASTS 

of Maeterlinck, and doubtless knows the mad 
ness that lurks in moon-haunted corridors ! 

That Duse triumphed was to be expected. 
She awed rather than astonished us, her 
skill taking on new meanings, new colours. 
All together, her art was a unique something 
that closely bordered on the clairvoyant. Her 
helpless silences were actually terrifying ; her 
poses most pathetic. Bianca Maria was admira- 
bly played by Signorina Civani, the Sirenetta of 
La Gioconda. She noted most fluently the 
loving, healthy nature of the girl who falls a 
victim to the shafts of Eros. It is with Sopho- 
cles's Antigone that the action begins ; it is with 
a motto from Antigone, Eros, unconquered in 
strife, that the play is overshadowed. 



D'Annunzio's new play, The Daughter of 
Jorio, has achieved some success in Italy, de- 
spite the absence of Eleonora Duse from the 
cast, and despite the reaction against the enthu- 
siasm of its premiere. When the drama was pro- 
duced at Milan it was put on for a " run," or the 
European equivalent of one. There was severe 
criticism, but the consensus seems to be that 
in his latest work that extraordinary creature, 
D'Annunzio, has outshone his earlier dramatic 
efforts. 

The chief quality that impresses itself upon 
the reader of La Figlia di Jorio is its superior 
344 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

dramatic movement as compared, for' example, 
with The Dead City or Francesca da Rimini 
by the same writer. The first act is full of 
vitality, its characterization excellent ; the cuts 
in Acts II and III made by D'Annunzio for the 
first performance greatly benefit the somewhat 
sluggish tempi of these scenes. The old rheto- 
rician and lover of beautiful phrases has not 
been killed in the Italian poet, merely "scotched." 
For one thing, he has struck that theatrical vein 
of gold, a new background, new methods of 
speech, new costumes, new ideas — or, rather, 
most ancient ones, though novel to the stage. 
Travelling with his friend, the painter Michetti, 
one summer in the savage mountainous country 
of the Abruzzi, D'Annunzio saturated himself 
with his accustomed receptivity to a strange 
people and environment, which has resulted in 
a powerful tragedy. Like Verga's discovery of 
the Sicilian peasant in Cavalleria Rusticana — a 
veritable treasure-trove for that poet and also for 
Mascagni — D'Annunzio in his encounter with 
the curious customs and pagan personalities of 
the hardy, superstitious Abruzzi, was enabled to 
lay up a stock of images for his new work. I 
doubt, however, if he has succeeded as well as 
Verga in getting close to the skin and soil of this 
peasantry. There is more than one awkward 
hiatus in The Daughter of Jorio, and an almost 
epileptic intensity in the development of the 
witch girl's character. 

The first act is the best, because the simplest 
345 



ICONOCLASTS 

and most sincere. It shows us a living room in 
a rustic house. The background and "proper- 
ties " are said to be wonderfully realistic. Aligi, 
the shepherd, is to marry. His bride's name is 
Vienda. He does not love her, for she was 
chosen by his parents — and in this old Italian 
land the father's command is law. The be- 
trothal ceremonies are beginning. The groom's 
sisters are near by. He is ill at ease, for he has 
been dreaming strange dreams. Vienda spills 
the broken bread of betrothal from her lap upon 
the floor. It is a maleficent sign. Suddenly 
there comes a noise of shouting and music. The 
harvesters, crazy with drink and the torrid heat 
of the sun, rush in. They have come to cele- 
brate. They are also chasing a human being, a 
miserable hunted girl of bad repute, the daugh- 
ter of Jorio, the magician. Hunted down, she 
claims sanctuary in the household. Although 
she is of ill-fame, although Aligi's father, La- 
zaro, has been wounded in a squabble about this 
girl, Mila di Codra, she is sheltered by the 
woman. Aligi is for turning her away; her 
coming spells more bad luck; the infuriated 
mob without demand admittance^ Enraged, the 
shepherd raises his staff to strike the unhappy 
fugitive. As he does this he is overtaken by 
fresh visions ; he thinks he sees Mila guarded 
by a weeping angel. He falls at her feet beg- 
ging her pardon. A cross is laid over the 
threshold, a litany sung by his sisters, and the 
angry reapers are hypnotized. They enter 
346 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

singly, kiss the cross, and dissolve homeward. 
Lazaro enters with his head in a bandage and 
Mila escapes. Another ill omen — the father 
and son both love the same woman. 

The second act discovers Aligi and Mila in a 
mountainous cave where they have lived for six 
months — in a state of innocence. Here the 
credulity of the spectator is taxed, and the lyric 
ecstasy of the poet waxes. It is nevertheless an 
idyllic episode. One kiss is exchanged, the first 
and the last, for Lazaro eventually finds his now 
disgraced son, and with a pair of sturdy rustics 
comes to carry away the witch. In the conflict 
that ensues the son murders the father. Act 
III brings us back to the old home of Aligi. 
His father's corpse lies in the garden, according 
to custom. The son is condemned to the awful 
death of the parricide — after his offending hand 
is cut off he is to be tied in a sack with a fierce 
dog and then thrown into the river. The end 
may be surmised. One consolation is not denied 
him — a cup of drink to induce forgetfulness. 
As the preparations are about completed Mila 
bursts upon the crowded scene — an impressive 
one, according to printed reports — and takes 
upon herself the blame of the affair. She it 
was, she declares, who murdered Lazaro. Aligi 
curses her in his delirium, as she is dragged 
away to be burnt alive, she the witch, the 
daughter of Jorio. Her triumphant voice is 
heard to the last, while for a background there 
is the chanting of the requiem and the trium- 
347 



ICONOCLASTS 

phant yelling and imprecations of the shepherds, 
the Abruzzi lusting for a human sacrifice. Then 
the curtain falls. Several critics discern in all 
this the triumph of religion over the senses — a 
solution that does their ingenuity credit, though 
far from convincing. 

It may be seen that there is real dramatic 
worth in the play, love and sacrifice being its 
very pith. Better still, the poet has become 
less self-absorbed and consequently more objec- 
tive. The human note predominates in this 
wild and highly coloured music. In his plays 
and novels and verse he has himself been the 
artistic and sterile hero — as Eleonora Duse, in 
the plays and one novel, their heroine. A Ger- 
man critic declares that Mila is only a sister of 
the crazy woman in A Spring Morning's Dream 
— as she, Duse, also is related to Silvia in Gio 
conda, to the blind wife in The Dead City, and 
Francesca, as well as La Foscarina in Fuoco, 
Duse, Eleonora Duse, always Duse. Lucky, 
thrice happy poet, to have been inspired by such 
a model ! To have had the opportunity of study- 
ing such a sublime, unhappy soul as is Duse's ! 

A German critic speaks slightingly of Das 
Geklingel der schonen Phrasen — the jingling 
of dulcet phrases — as a drawback to the action. 
Doubtless this is true. Often we cannot hear 
the play because of the words. The chief thing 
to be remarked, however, is the improvement in 
dramatic spirit and rhythm and the gratifying 
supremacy of the dramatic over the lyric and 
348 



DUSE AND D'ANNUNZIO 

literary qualities — the latter hitherto anti-dra- 
matic elements in the plays of D'Annunzio. 

The poet is now working on a new three-act 
tragedy, The Ship, — in which Duse is to appear 
at La Scala this spring. The theme is Vene- 
tian — that Venice which both Duse and D'An- 
nunzio love so well; and also on a modern drama 
entitled, The Light Under the Bushel 



8*9 



XI 

VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM 

"In life," said Barbey dAurevilly, "we are 
strangled between two doors, of which the one 
is labelled Too Soon and the other Too Late." 
The brilliant Beau Brummel of French literature 
who uttered this fatidical speech was a contem 
porary of the unhappy, impulsive man of genius, 
poet, mystic, and dramatist, who set Paris agog 
with his novels, short stories, plays, his half- 
crazy conduct, his epigrams, his fantastic litiga- 
tions, and his cruel death — Villiers de l'lsle 
Adam. The bosom friend of Charles Baudelaire 
and Richard Wagner, petted at Bayreuth, feted 
in Paris, nevertheless he died in want, was buried 
by his friends, and was proud, lonely, aristocratic 
to the very end — a death from cancer. 

His life furnishes material for one of his ironic, 
bitter, disturbing tales. Born in Brittany, No- 
vember 28, 1838, he died at Paris in a religious 
hospital, August 19, 1889. A fierce, even mili- 
tant, Roman Catholic — he dedicated a book to 
the Pope — he shocked his coreligionists by the 
confusing mixture of fanatical piety and fantas- 
tic blasphemy which winds through his bizarre 
works. He is best known to Americans by the 
350 



VILLIERS DE LTSLE ADAM 

story in his Contes Cruels, entitled, The Torture 
by Hope, which recalls Poe at his best, the Poe 
of The Pit and the Pendulum. His little play, 
The Revolt, was translated and first appeared in 
the Fortnightly Review, December, 1897. Arthur 
Symons has translated a poem, Aveu, and Vance 
Thompson, in the defunct pages of Mile. New 
York, wrote often of the celebrated Frenchman. 

The critical bibliography of Villiers de l'lsle 
Adam is not a vast one. There is, besides his 
principal works, only his life by his cousin 
Vicomte Robert du Pontavice de Heussey ; R£my 
de Gourmont's brief, sympathetic notice in his 
inimitable Le Livre des Masques ; Anatole 
France in La Vie Litt^raire has dealt with the 
poet most subtly, as is his wont; Arthur Sy* 
mons's study ; Mallarme's lecture ; a few carica- 
tures and a sketch by Paul Verlaine ; a historic 
consideration by Alexis von Kraemer, translated 
from the Finnish ; a charming and extended 
etude by Gustave Kahn; short essays by the 
lamented Hennequin, by J. K. Huysmans, in A 
Rebours, by Sarcey, Gustave Guiches, Henry 
Bordeaux, Teodor de Wyzewa, Georges Roden- 
back, Catulle Mendes ; and fragmentary accounts 
in the ever valuable Mercure de France — and 
there the list is snuffed out. 

Not precisely dissolute, rather disorganized, 
the life of Adam could be transformed into an 
object sermon by the wily educator and moral- 
monger. But that would be a poor way of view- 
ing it Born without average will power, except 
35i 



ICONOCLASTS 

the will to imagine beautiful and strange things, 
Villiers, as he is generally called, all his years 
fought the contending impulses of his dual na- 
ture ; fought bravely sometimes in the open air 
with the blue sky smiling down on him ; fought 
as if facing an ambuscade at dark, and under 
the lowering clouds when all the powers of evil 
were abroad and at his elbow. Then, he was 
what Bayard Taylor called Edgar Poe — a bird 
of the night ; a prowling noctambulist ; a fever- 
ish being, whose violent gestures, burning eyes, 
and irresolute somnambulistic gait told the tale, 
the damnable and thrice-told tale, of wasted 
genius. 

Poe is the literary ancestor of nearly all the 
Parnassian and Diabolic groups — ah, this mania 
for schools and groups and movements in Paris ! 
Poe begat Baudelaire and Baudelaire begat Bar- 
bey d'Aurevilly and Villiers de ITsle Adam, and 
the last-named begat Verlaine and Huysmans — 
and a long chain of other gifted men can claim 
these two as parents, even to Mallarme, De Mau- 
passant, and Henri de Regnier (who has read 
the Horla of Guy de Maupassant will feel that 
therein the unhappy disciple of Flaubert has 
raised to a terrifying degree the methods of 
Poe; nor must Regnier's La Canne de Jaspe be 
forgotten). But they all come from Poe ; Poe, 
who influenced Swinburne through Baudelaire ; 
Poe, who nearly swept the young Maeterlinck 
from his moorings in the stagnant fens and 
under the morose sky of his lowlands. If we 
352 



VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM 

frave no great school of literature in America, we 
;an at least point to Poe as the progenitor of a 
half-dozen continental literatures. 

Villiers can be traced to Poe on one side, just 
as Chateaubriand is another of his ancestors. 
M. de Gourmont deplores the criticism which 
would detach Villiers from his time and isolate 
nim as a species of intellectual monster. There 
is much that is fantastic, even bizarre, in his 
work, and he never escaped the besetting sin of 
his associates, headed by Baudelaire, the childish 
desire to fyater le bourgeois, to shock conven- 
tional morality and manners by eccentric behav- 
iour, outrageous speech, and paradoxical writings. 
This legacy of the romantic movement of 1830 
really came across the water in Byron's poses 
of wickedness and heroic mystifications. It was, 
in reality, the Byronic attitude transposed to the 
Paris boulevards. Gautier wore a pink doublet 
(not scarlet, he says), and it was elevated to a 
symbol. Let us be scarlet, said these wild, young 
fellows, let our sins be splendid ! And then the 
crew would wander abroad, making the night 
resound with their lyric outbursts, happy if a 
respectable citizen were scandalized, and in their 
pockets, a world too wide for their money hardly 
the price of a bottle ! 

It was glorious, and it was art. But who 
cared, who knew ? If a man of Baudelaire's 
intellectual powers, a profound critic, genius, 
and poet, could dye his hair green, simply 
to attract attention in the caf£s why should 
353 



ICONOCLASTS 

not men of lesser abilities follow suit and 
commit all manner of extravagant pranks ? 
Leconte de Lisle, impeccable poet and a prim 
sort of person, impatiently exclaimed : " Oh, ces 
jeunes gens ! Tous fumistes ! " And Thiers 
allowed to escape him the one mot of his com- 
placent life worth remembering, " The Roman- 
ticists — that's the Commune!" Perhaps the 
pink doublets and strange oaths of Ernani and 
1830 were transformed into the grim figures of 
that later lurid epoch. 

Villiers was in the very core of this artistic 
Paris. He slept all day — or dreamed. At 
nightfall he stepped across the sill of his door, 
and when he had friends, money, glory, he 
dined at Brebant's ; when he was shabby, he 
remained on the exterior boulevard. There, 
in some modest cafe, seated at a table sur- 
rounded by disciples eager for his ideas, his 
poetry, his scintillating wit, — eager to steal it 
and sell it as their own, — the Master spoke, his 
vague blue eyes gleaming, his long white hand 
waving aloft like a flag of revolt. What dreams, 
what eloquence, what a soul, went under on this 
ignoble battle-field ! What slain ideals and poetry 
wasted in the very utterance, and what inroads 
on a nervous, sickly constitution ! But Villiers 
lived the life he had elected. He was poor, 
always poor, and poverty makes extraordinary 
bedfellows. But — his room-mates were the 
most intellectual spirits of modern France. If 
Baudelaire could not drop in on him at his dusty 
354 



VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM 

lodgings, Richard Wagner would. And so there 
was talk — such talk — and there was that 
feeling of expansion, of liberation, which comes 
when a man like Turgenev could say to Flau- 
bert : " Cheer up, old fellow ! After all you are 
Flaubert ! " 

Villiers never forgot that he was Villiers. His 
pride, like his piety, was Luciferian. Nobly de- 
scended, he almost fought a duel with a distant 
cousin who doubted his birth. He claimed to 
spring from the ten times blue blood of a 
Grand Master of the Order of Saint John of 
Jerusalem, who defended Rhodes against the 
Turks in the time of Charles V. With this 
thought he often wandered into a cafe and had 
his absinthe charged on the slate of the ideal, 
the reckoning of which no true poet listeth. 

A mystic among mystics, yet his . linen was 
not always impeccable. Verlaine, another son 
of the stars and sewers, wrote, " I am far from 
sure that the philosophy of Villiers will not 
one day become the formula of our century." 
" Know, once and for all, that there is for thee 
no other universe than that conception which is 
reflected at the bottom of thy thoughts " — this 
utterance of Villiers is the keystone of his sys- 
tem. In Elen (1864), his greatest drama, an- 
other idea comes to the surface in the dialogue 
of Samuel and Goetze. Samuel speaks : " Sci- 
ence will not suffice. Sooner or later you will 
end by coming to your knees." Goetze : " Be- 
fore what ? " Samuel ; " Before the darkness." 
355 



ICONOCLASTS 

His life long, Villiers traversed the darkness 
which encompasses with the sure, swift step 
of a nyctalops, one who can pierce with his 
glance the deepest obscurity. So it is that in 
his plays and stories we are conscious of the 
great mystery of life and death hemming us 
about. Sometimes this atmosphere is morbidly 
oppressive, sometimes it is relieved by gay, 
maniacal bursts of laughter. Again it lifts 
and reveals the mild heavens streaked with 
menacing irony. There is a lugubrious under- 
current in the buffooneries of Villiers. Philip 
Hale has translated the cruel story of the swans 
massacred by fear. This poet slew his soul by 
his evocation of terror. 

He is a mystic, a spiritual romantic, and only 
a realist in his sardonic pictures of Paris life, 
tiny cabinet pictures, etchings, bitten out with 
the aqua fortis of his ghastly irony. There is 
the irony, a mask behind which pity, sympathy, 
lurk; Shakespeare wore this mask at times. 
And there is the irony that withers, that blasts. 
This is Villiers. 

Axel is both difficult and illuminative reading. 
It is in four acts with nine scenes. Each act 
or part is respectively entitled : The Religious 
World, The Tragic World, The Occult World, 
The Passional World. The poet had not known 
Wagner and his Tetralogy for naught. Sara is 
a superb creation — but not on the boards, in the 
disillusioning, depoetizing, troubled, and malarial 
air of the stage ! It was a mistake to play Axe 7 
356 



VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM 

in Paris. Its solemn act of rejection of life at 
the moment "when life becomes ideal" is hardly 
fitting for the theatre. A drama to be played 
by poets before a parterre of poets ! Arthur 
Symons has noticed with his accustomed acuity 
that " the modern drama under the democratic 
influence of Ibsen, the positive influence of 
Dumas fits, has limited itself to the expression 
of temperaments in the one case, of theoretic 
intelligences in the other, in as nearly as possi- 
ble the words which the average man would use 
for the statement of his emotions and ideas. 
The form, that is, is degraded below the level 
of the characters whom it attempts to express." 

It is a point well taken, though I feel inclined 
to rebel at the pinning down of form to language 
alone. Ibsen's terseness — and remember we 
only see him in the cold light of Mr. Archer's 
translations — is one of his merits ; but his form, 
his dramatic form, is not alone in his text, but 
in the serene and ordered procession of his 
dramatic action. Villiers is more poetically 
eloquent than the Ibsen of the prose dramas. 
But as logical or as dramatic — ! 

Mr. Symons adds, " La Revolte, which seems 
to anticipate A Doll's House, shows us an 
aristocratic Ibsen, touching reality with a cer- 
tain disdain, certainly with far less skill, cer- 
tainly with far more beauty." For me in a play 
of character the beauty that appeals is not 
purely verbal. It is the beauty of character qud 
character, and the beauty of events marshalled 
357 



ICONOCLASTS 

like a great sequence of mysterious music, hum- 
ming with the indefinable harmonies of life. 
Ibsen makes this music ; so does Gerhart 
Hauptmann. Axel is noble drama, despite its 
formal shortcoming, its dream-like quality. 
Many went begging to Villiers, and few came 
away empty-handed. Prodigal in genius, he 
was prodigal in giving. 

This poet, like most poets, loathed medioc- 
rity. He sought the exceptional, the complex 
soul. "A chacun son infini," he said; and in 
Axel he cries : " As for living, our servants will 
do that for us ! As at the play in a central 
stall, one sits out so as not to disturb one's 
neighbours — out of courtesy, in a word — some 
play written in a wearisome style of which one 
does not like the subject, so I lived, out of 
politeness." Here is the gauge cast disdain- 
fully to those who forever pelt us with sweet 
phrases about loving our neighbour, about 
altruism, sympathy, and social obligations — all 
the self-illuding, socialistic cant, in a word, that 
rankles in the breast of the solitary proud man 
and poisons the mind of the weak. Villiers is 
the exorcist of the real, the bearer of the ideal, 
wrote De Gourmont, himself a poetic individ- 
ualist. And he sums up, " Villiers knew all 
forms of intellectual intoxication/' 

Villiers associated much with Richard Wag- 
ner, and with Baudelaire was an ardent upholder 
of the new music during the troubled times of 
the Tannhauser fiasco. He played the piano i 

358 



VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM 

knew the Ring by heart — no mean feat — and 
set Baudelaire's poems to music, anticipating 
Charles Martin Loeffler by nearly a half-cen- 
tury. Of one of them the music is said to be 
still extant. It is the poem with this couplet : — 

Our beds shall be scented with sweetest perfume, 
Our divans be as cool and dark as the tomb. 

Probably the most lifelike, verbal portrait of 
Wagner is that of Villiers's. In a memorable 
passage, which I commend to Mr. Finck as testi- 
mony with which to snub recalcitrant clergy- 
men and others, Villiers notes Wagner's violent 
disclaimer that his Parsifal was merely the 
work of the artist and not of the believing 
Christian. " Why, if I did not feel in my 
inmost soul the living light and love of that 
Christian faith, my works . . . would be the 
works of a liar and an ape. My art is my 
prayer." Thus Villiers reports Wagner — Wag- 
ner, whose marvellous soul changed colour every 
moment, like one of those exquisite flying fishes 
which paint the air and waters of the tropics. 

In 1 86 1, at Baudelaire's home, Villiers met 
Richard Wagner. It was at a period of great 
depression for that master. Villiers speaks of 
the interview as the most memorable of his life. 
" Wagner, with his high, remarkable forehead, 
almost terrifying in its development; his deep 
blue eyes, with their slow, steady, magnetic 
glance ; his thin, strongly marked features, 
changing from one shade of pallor to another; 
359 



xCONOCLASTS 

his imperious hooked nose; his delicate, thin 
lipped, unsatisfied, ironic mouth ; his exceed- 
ingly strong, projecting, and pointed chin — ■ 
seemed to Villiers like the archangel of celestial 
combat." A rare little band, composed of Wag- 
ner, Villiers, Baudelaire, and Catulle Mendes, 
often walked the town after midnight. Once 
they were down along a dreary street which 
ends at the Quai Saint-Eustache, and there 
Wagner pointed out to them the window of a 
garret at the top of a very high house. In it 
he said he almost starved, despaired, even medi- 
tated suicide. Villiers was a Wagnerian among 
Wagnerians. He paraphrased in words his im- 
pressions of the German's music, and some of 
these were published in Catulle Mendes's Revue 
Fantaisiste. He visited Wagner at Triebchen, 
near Lucerne, in Switzerland, although he was 
so poor that he had to walk part of the distance. 
One of Villiers's characters was Triboulat Bon- 
homet. This was the man who was so avid of 
new sensations in music that he cruelly slew 
swans. During the autumn of 1879 Villiers was 
at Bayreuth in company with Judith Gautier 
and Catulle Mendes, and gave a reading from 
his works before a lot of crowned heads, Wag- 
ner and Liszt included. He read some of the 
curious adventures 01 Bonhomet, and was sur- 
prised to hear his audience laugh, at first quietly, 
at last unrestrainedly. At last the tempest of 
laughter rose so high that the reader ceased and 
cast a glance full of vague suspicion round his 
360 



VILLIERS DE LTSLE ADAM 

audience. The Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, 
who sat beside him, touched his shoulder and 
pointed to a person sitting just opposite them. 
Villiers, with a little sharp cry, dropped the 
manuscript from his trembling fingers and gave 
evident signs of lively terror. There in front 
of him, surrounded by a bevy of beautiful 
women, gazing at him with shining eyes, his 
enormous mouth opened in stentorian laughter, 
his huge hands leading applause, was Dr. Tri- 
boulat Bonhomet himself, flesh and bone. It 
was Franz Liszt ! 

From the very first line of the manuscript, in 
which Villiers had minutely described the doctor, 
the whole audience had been struck by the resem- 
blance between the great pianist and Triboulat 
Bonhomet, and as the description went on the 
likeness increased — dress, gestures, habits, all 
bore a striking similarity. One person alone 
did not perceive the identity, and he laughed 
louder than the rest — Liszt himself. Finally 
the reading had to be stopped on account of 
the general hilarity, but Liszt was never told 
of the joke. 

The most curious episode in the life of Villiers 
was when he won a prize with his five-act play, 
The New World. A dramatic competition was 
announced by the theatrical press of Paris. A 
medal of honour and ten thousand francs were 
offered to the French dramatic author who 
would " most powerfully recall in a work of 
four or five acts the episode of the proclama- 

361 



ICONOCLASTS 

tion of the independence of the United States, 
the hundredth anniversary of which fell on 
July 4, 1876. The two examining juries were 
composed as follows : the first, of the principal 
critics of the French theatrical press; the 
second, of Victor Hugo, honorary president ; 
Emile Augier, Octave Feuillet, and Ernest 
Legouve, members of the French Academy ; 
Mr. Grenville Murray, representing the New 
York Herald, and M. Perrin, administrator-gen- 
eral of the Theatre Frangais." 

Villiers's play conquered. His New World 
was passed by both juries. But through some 
sort of official devilry he received neither money 
nor medal ; nor was his play produced. He 
had the mortification of seeing a second-rate 
piece by Armand d'Artois given while his own 
work collected dust in the manuscript box of 
the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre. Naturally he 
raised a hubbub. He bearded the venerable 
Hugo at his home and there insulted not only 
the poet, but also the aged Legouve. Conflict was 
the very breath of this visionary's nostrils. Did 
he not institute a ridiculous lawsuit against the 
author of a play because it vilified, so he claimed, 
a very remote ancestor ? After interminable 
. processes he was non-suited. And The New 
5 World was his favourite drama ! Villiers had 
long dreamed of becoming the Richard Wagner 
of the drama. 

His cousin says : " His idea was that the 
characteristics of the nation, or of the event 
362 






VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM 

which was to be portrayed, should be imported 
into the framework of some personal intrigue, 
in which each individual of the dramatis personal 
should personify in his language, attitude, or 
actions some one of the numerous elements pro- 
duced by the friction of the incidents of the 
play." Here is the leading motive idea of 
Wagner — a dangerous idea in the drama, where 
the pattern must not be too regular or too per- 
sistent. Viiliers dreamed of a symphonic drama 
with a densely woven web. Poets seldom realize 
the bigness of that hollow frame, the theatre, 
on the background of which they must paint in 
bold, splashing colours, or else pay the penalty 
of not being seen at all. It is scene, not minia- 
ture, painting which is the real art of the drama. 
In sooth, The New World is a play that would 
puzzle the most sanguine manager. It has been 
called "one of the best constructed, deepest, 
and most passionate dramas of the present day," 
by a prejudiced witness, the cousin of the poet. 
Against the wishes of his true friends, Viiliers 
allowed a representation, with dire results. 
Sarcey fairly peppered it with his wit ; so bad 
were the actors and actresses that the author 
himself hissed furiously at every performance. 
This was at the Theatre des Nations, 1883. 
There were six representations. And such an 
America as this poet depicts ! It is as illusory, 
in another way, as Victor Hugo's England. 
Viiliers had evidently read Chateaubriand's 
Atala — Chateaubriand, who cajoled his country- 
363 



ICONOCLASTS 

men into the belief that he lived for years in 
Louisiana ! — and so we are given some odd 
characters, odd happenings, odder history. 
Mistress Andrews, the heroine, is a sort of an 
American Melusina. Can any one in his most 
exalted mood picture an American Melusina ? 

And so this " hybrid, complex, contradictory 
being, by turns mysterious, terrible, cynical, 
innocent, loving, tragic, grotesque " poet, rolled 
down the hill of life. Is it not Pascal who says : 
" The last act is always tragedy, whatever fine 
comedy there may have been in the rest of life. 
We must all die alone " ? Villiers was lonely 
and dying from his youth. Death was his inti- 
mate companion, sometimes a boon one, but 
oftener a consoling friend. The death's-head 
adorns his wassail time. Yet this poet actually 
went into politics, was a candidate at the elec- 
tions of the Conseil General y and was, luckily 
enough, defeated. One trembles at the idea of 
this aristocratic anarch among the bleating law- 
makers. It is characteristic of him that he ac- 
cepted his defeat calmly because his opponent 
was De Heredia the poet. Noblesse oblige! 

Villiers, like most European poets, had formed 
a mighty ideal of America and the Americans. 
He believed this country and its institutions to 
be what Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and a few 
other genuine patriots hoped it would be. He 
entertained for Thomas Edison the deepest ad- 
miration. His novel, a grotesque book, The 
Eve of the Future, contains a fanciful account 
364 



VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM 

of Menlo Park and its " terrifying proprietor." 
When Edison went to the Paris exhibition in 
1889 he became acquainted with Villiers's novel. 
He read it at a sitting and expressed himself 
thus : " That man is greater than I. I can only 
invent. He creates." He did not meet the 
author, who was mortally ill, though an attempt 
was made to bring the Frenchman and Ameri- 
can together. The leading motive of The Eve 
of the Future, pushed to an ingenuity bordering 
on insanity, is the construction of an artificial 
woman which when wound up imitates in every 
respect the daily life of a cultivated lady ! 

J. K. Huysmans became known to Villiers, 
and his critical recognition of his genius, tardy 
though it was, was one of the few consolations 
accorded this unhappy man by fate. Huysmans 
it was who gently persuaded Villiers to make a 
deathbed marriage and legitimize his son. His 
agony was intensified by the fact that his wife 
could not sign her name to the marriage con- 
tract, she could only make a cross. The artist in 
this dying man persisted to the last. Huysmans 
with his omnivorous eye has noted the sigh that 
escaped from the semi-moribund poet. 

Thus he lived, thus he died, a stranger in a 
strange world. His plays may be better appre- 
ciated some day. If Ibsen profited by The Re- 
volt, then the seed of Villiers has not been sown 
in vain. Nothing reveals Ibsen's mastery of 
the dramatic form so completely as his treatment 
of the woman who revolts and leaves her home, 

365 



ICONOCLASTS 

when compared to Villiers's handling of the 
same idea. Elizabeth goes away in despair, but 
to return. Nora departs, and the curtain quickly 
severs us from her future, her " miracle" speech 
being a faint prophecy that may be expanded 
some day into a fulfilment. Villiers was perhaps 
the pioneer; though revolting women abound 
in Dumas, abound in the Bible, for that matter ; 
but the specific woman who puts up the shutters 
of the shop, and declares the dissolution of the 
matrimonial firm, is the creation of Villiers. 
Ibsen developed the idea, and, great artist that 
he is, made of it a formal drama of beauty and 
dramatic significance — which The Revolt is not. 
There are many loose psychologic ends left un- 
tied by the Frenchman, and his conclusion is 
dramatically ineffectual. 

What is the value of such a life, what its mean- 
ings ? may be asked by the curious impertinents. 
Why select for study the character and career 
of a half-mad mystic ? Simply because Villiers 
is a poet and not a politician. It is because 
Villiers is Villiers that he interests the student 
of literature and humanity. And the bravery, 
the incomparable bravery, of the man who like 
Childe Roland blew his slug-horn, dauntless to 
the last ! In his Azrael he uses as a motto 
Hassan-ben-Sabbah's " O Death ! those who 
are about to live, salute thee." All the soul of 
Villiers de lTsle Adam is in that magnificently 
defiant challenge ! 

366 



XII 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 



The dramatical evolution of Maurice Maeter 
linck. 

When this Belgian poet, dramatist, mystic, 
became known in America, his plays, avowedly 
written for marionettes, were received with open- 
eyed wonder or prolonged laughter. Any idea 
that he be taken seriously was scouted by seri- 
ous critics, and the usual fate befell them — 
well-meaning amateurs seized them as legiti- 
mate prey. There is no denying the fact that 
at one time Maeterlinck meant for most people 
a crazy crow masquerading in tail feathers 
plucked from the Swan of Avon. 

But caricature and critical malignity did not 
retard the growth of this very remarkable young 
man — he was born in 1862 — and presently we 
heard more of him. After we had finished The 
Treasure of the Lowly, Wisdom and Destiny, 
The Buried Temple, and The Double Garden, it 
was conceded that a mistake had been made just 
as in Browning's case. A mystic — yes, and 
one who had adjusted his very sensitive scheme 
367 



ICONOCLASTS 

of thought to the practical work-a-day worla. 
A Belgian Emerson, rather than a Belgian 
Shakespeare ; but an Emerson who had in him 
much of Edgar Allan Poe. Toujours Poe, in 
any consideration of modern continental poets. 

Maeterlinck began with a volume of poems 
entitled Serres Chaudes, often compared to 
the unrhymed, loose rhythmic prose of Walt 
Whitman. They do bear a certain superficial 
resemblance to Whitman's effusions, though not 
in idea. It is rather a cataloguing, aimless ap- 
parently, of widely disparate subjects. But the 
substance derives more from that extraordinary 
book of an extraordinary poet, Les Illuminations 
by Arthur Rimbaud, than from the ragged, epi- 
cal lines of Whitman. Take, for example, the 
following specimen of Maeterlinck's ante in 
Serres Chaudes : — 

" One day there was a poor little festival in 
the suburbs of my soul. They mowed the hem- 
lock there one Sunday morning, and all the con- 
vent virgins saw the ships pass by on the canal 
one sunny fast day, while the swans suffered 
under a poisonous bridge. The trees were 
lopped about the prison ; medicines were 
brought one afternoon in June and meals for 
the patients were spread over the whole 
horizon." 

Now read Rimbaud, translated admirably by 

Aline Gorren : " As soon as the Idea of the 

Deluge had sunk back into its place, a rabbit 

halted amid the sainfoin and the small swing 

*68 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

ing bells and said its prayers to the rainbow, 
through the spider's web. . . . The caravans 
started. And the splendid hotel was erected 
upon the chaos of ice and night at the Pole. 
... In hours of bitterness I imagine balls of 
sapphire, of metal. I am master of the silence. 
Why should the semblance of a vent-hole seem 
to pale up there at the corner of a vault ? " 

Both these hallucinations illustrate what 
R£my de Gourmont would call disassociation 
of ideas. 

Maeterlinck fervently studied the English 
dramatic classics. The result was wild fer- 
ment. In 1889 he published Princess Maleine, 
and such an impression did its whirling words 
create that Octave Mirbeau wrote his famous 
article in the Paris Figaro, August 24, 1890, in 
the course of which he made this statement, 
" M. Maurice Maeterlinck nous a donne" l'ceuvre 
la plus g^niale de ce temps, et la plus extraor- 
dinaire et la plus na'fve aussi, comparable et — 
oserai-je le dire ? — superieure en beauts a ce 
qu'il y a de plus beau dans Shakespeare . . . 
plus tragique que Macbeth, plus extraordinaire 
en pensee que Hamlet." 

Either M. Mirbeau, who has often played the 
r61e of poet-anarchist, had not read Shakespeare 
reasonably, or else he was indulging in a pleasing 
mystification. Ah, that fatal plus, the uncriti- 
cal overplus, how it does jump up from the page 
smiting the optics with rude humour ! As a mat- 
ter of sheer fact, Princess Maleine is an undi- 
369 



ICONOCLASTS 

gested compound of Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, 
and, as Arthur Symons sagely remarks, with 
more of the Elizabethan violence we find in 
Webster and Tourneur than in Shakespeare. 
And its author was only a youth in his twenties. 

However, with all its crudities, its imitations, 
its impossible melange of blood, lust, tears, terror, 
there are several elements in the crazy play 
that indicate latent gifts of a high order. The 
range is narrow and Poe-like. Fear is the theme, 
and a strange repetition the method of expres- 
sion. There is a young prince, a Hamlet, who 
has fed on the art of the modern decadents. 
He is a spiritual half-brother to Laforgue's 
Hamlet, shorn of that ironist's humour. Never 
could Prince Hjalmar of the Maeterlinck tragedy 
utter such a sublimely ironic soliloquy as La- 
forgue's, more Shakespearian than Shakespeare. 

" Alas ! poor Yorick ! As one seems to hear, 
in one little shell, all the multitudinous roar of 
the ocean, so I here seem to perceive the whole 
quenchless symphony of the universal soul, of 
whose echoes this box was as the cross-roads. 
And do you imagine a human race that would 
look no farther, that would abide by this vaguely 
immortal sound, which one hears in a hollow 
skull, by way of explanation of death, by way 
of religion ? . . . They also had their time, 
all these small folk of history ; learning to read, 
paring their nails, illuminating the unsavoury 
lamp, loving every night, gormandizing, vain, 
crazy for compliments, kisses. . . . But yet^ 
.370 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

no longer to be, no longer to be in it, no longer to 
be of it ! Not even to be able to strain against 
one's human heart, any afternoon in the week, 
the melancholy of centuries compressed into one 
little chord upon the piano ! . . ." 

Maeterlinck's hero, too, is oppressed by the 
mystery of life. Throughout the drama the 
Fate of ancient tragedy marches remorselessly 
through the doomed palace of the king. 
Thanks to Maeterlinck, this Fate takes on a 
new countenance. A disquieting attack is made 
upon the nerves by the repercussive repetitions, 
the dense pall of melancholy hanging over the 
place. A madhouse is a cheerful place by com- 
parison. One king has slain another and made 
a beggar outcast of the Princess royal, Maleine. 
She is loved by and loves Prince Hjalmar — an 
odd transposition of the sunny passions of Romeo 
and Juliet. The beggar girl becomes maid in 
the palace of her father's murderer. It is not a 
happy habitation. The old King is senile and 
debauched by Anne, Queen of Jutland. This mis- 
creant, a hideous combination of Lady Macbeth, 
Messaline, and Phaedra, has a daughter bearing 
the pretty name of Uglyane. Poor Uglyane ! 
She is beautiful, unloved. The one assignation 
of her life is defeated by Maleine, who plays a 
cruel trick upon her. Going to the fountain — 
later we shall find that fountains assume impor- 
tant rdles in these plays — Maleine meets Hjalmar. 
Then we get the true Maeterlinck atmosphere. 
And this is where it may come from : — 
371 



ICONOCLASTS 

I looked upon the scene before me — upon the 
mere house and the simple landscape features of the 
domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant, eye- 
like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a 
few white trunks of decayed trees. ... I reined my 
horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid 
tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling and 
gazed down. . . . About the whole mansion and 
domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to them- 
selves and their immediate vicinity ; an atmosphere 
which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which 
had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray 
wall, and the silent tarn ; a pestilent and mystic vapour, 
dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued. 

Pestilent and mystic is the atmosphere of 
Princess Maleine. The quotation is from The 
Fall of the House of Usher. There is much of 
Poe's dark tarn, of Auber, and the misty mid- 
region of Weir in the early Maeterlinck. 

The denouement is horrible. Maleine is 
strangled by the Queen, who also loves Hjalmar, 
and to the accompaniment of a lunar eclipse, 
thunderbolts, a cyclone, meteors that explode, 
wounded swans that fall from stormy skies, this 
night of strange portents comes to an end after 
the prince avenges Maleine by stabbing the 
queen and killing himself. There is a dog that 
sniffs, scratches, and howls at the locked door 
of the murdered princess. Its name is Pluto. 
There are chanting and spectral nuns, lewd 
beggars, an old Shakespearian nurse, a freakish 
boy, and the usual scared courtiers. The scenes 
372 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

do not hang together at all — there is no se- 
quence of action, only of moods ; or rather the 
same mood persists throughout. Yet the lines 
bite at times, and there are great fissures of 
silence, pauses as deep and as sinister as murky 
midnight pools. 

These pauses are always pregnant, — like 
the pauses in strange pages of Schumann or 
those mysterious empty bars at the beginning of 
a Chopin tragedy in tone, — empty, forbidding 
vestibules to woful edifices. 

" There is a little kitchen maid's soul at the 
bottom of her green eyes ; " "lam sick to die 
of it one of those twenty thousand nights we 
have to live;" "How dark? how dark? Is a 
forest lit up like a ball room ? " " The poor 
never know anything ; " " Will she not have a 
little silence in her heart ? " " She is as cold as 
an earthworm ; " " Oh ! look, look at their eyes. 
They will leap out upon me like frogs ; " " My 
God ! My God ! She is waiting now on the 
wharves of hell ; " " How unhappy the dead 
look ! " These and many more, with gasps and 
ejaculations, make up a dialogue that is at least 
original, though bizarre. Naturally it is all the 
fruit of green, immature genius. 

The ideas, hysterical and few as they are, 
begin to assume some coherence if compared 
with the emotional and disconnected experi- 
ments of the poems. 

Maeterlinck has defined his aesthetic in his 
prose essays. He played queer pranks upon 
373 



ICONOCLASTS 

the nerves with these shadows, these spiritual 
marionettes, which are pure abstractions typify- 
ing various qualities of the temperament. The 
iteration of his speech is like the dripping of 
water upon the heads of the condemned. It 
finally stuns the consciousness, and then, like a 
performer upon some fantastic instrument with 
one string, this virtuoso executes variations 
boasting a solitary theme — the fear of Fear. 
Speech, says Maeterlinck, is never the me- 
dium of communication of real and inmost 
thoughts. Silence alone can transmit them 
from soul to soul. We talk to fill up the blanks 
of life. Silence is so truth-telling, so illumi- 
native, that few have the courage to face it. 
Mankind fears silence more than the dark. 
(Poe again; Silence.) The most illuminating 
silence of all, the most irresistible, is the Silence 
of Death. It is the unspoken word that reveals 
our inner self. " We do not know each other ; 
we have not yet dared to be silent together." 
Modern thought and literature lack this mystic 
element, lack the atmosphere of the spiritual, 
perfect as is its technic and its intellectual 
equipment. The Russians have it in their fiction 
— a fiction of epilepsy and burning spiritual 
crises. The Middle Ages had it. Men stood 
nearer to nature, to God. They understood chil- 
dren, women, animals, plants, inanimate objects, 
with greater tenderness and greater depth. " The 
statues and paintings they have left us may not 
be perfect, but a mysterious power and secret 
374 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

charm that I cannot define are imprisoned within 
them, and bestow upon them perpetual youth. 
Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, are filled with 
the mysterious chant of the infinite, the threat- 
ening silence of souls and of gods, eternity 
thundering on the horizon, fate and fatality per- 
ceived interiorly without any one being able to 
say by what signs they have been recognized." 

Here we recognize the true mystic, the feeder 
upon the writings of Emerson, Novalis, the 
Admirable Ruysbroeck ; Plato, Plotinus, St. 
Bernard, Jacob Boehme, and Coleridge. And 
while he achieves astonishing flights into the 
blue, he always returns to mother earth. There 
is spiritual lift in his words, — lift and of ttimes 
intoxication. Generations of Flemish ancestors 
have dowered this young thinker with solid 
nerves and a saner intellectual apparatus than 
his early critics imagined. And he never ex- 
hibits what old Chaucer called " the spiced con- 
science." Neither hell's flames nor the joys of 
heaven appear in his pages. He preaches only 
of man and the soul of man. 

Without the mystery of life, life is not worth 
the living. The static opposed to the dynamic 
theatre is his ideal mood, not action ; the imma- 
terial, not the obvious. Hamlet is not awake — 
at every moment does he advance to the very 
brink of awakening. The mysterious chant of 
the Infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and 
of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon, 
the destiny or fatality that we are conscious 
375 



ICONOCLASTS 

within us, though by what tokens none may ith 
— do not all these underlie King Lear, Macbeth, 
Hamlet ? Are there not elements of deeper 
gravity and stability in happiness in a single 
moment of repose than in the whirlwind of 
passion ? Does the soul only flower on nights 
of storm ? " But to the tragic author, as to the 
mediocre painter who still lingers over historical 
pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote 
that appeals . . . whereas it is far away from 
bloodshed, battle-cry, and sword thrust that the 
lives of most of us flow on, and men's tears are 
silent to-day, and invisible, and almost spiritual." 
Maeterlinck goes to the modern theatre and 
feels as if he had spent a few hours with 
his ancestors, who conceived life as something 
that was primitive, arid, and brutal. He sees 
murder, hears of deceived husbands and wives 
instead of being shown some act of life " traced 
back to its sources and to its mystery by con- 
necting links." He yearns for one of the 
strange moments of a higher life that flit unper- 
ceived through his dreariest hours. " Othello 
does not appear to live the august daily life of 
Hamlet, who has the time to live, inasmuch as 
he does not act. Othello is admirably jealous. 
But is it not perhaps an ancient error to imagine 
that it is at the moment when this passion, or 
others of equal violence, possess us that we 
live our truest lives ? I have grown to believe 
that an old man, seated in his arm-chair, waiting 
patiently with his lamp beside him ; giving uiv- 
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MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

conscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign 
about the house, interpreting, without compre- 
hending, the silence of doors and windows and 
the quivering voice of light, submitting with 
bent head to the presence of his soul and his 
destiny — an old man, who conceives not that 
all the powers of this world, like so many heed- 
ful servants, are mingling and keeping vigil in 
his room, who suspects not that the very sun 
is supporting in space the little table against 
which he leans or that every star in heaven and 
every fibre of the soul are directly concerned 
in the movement of an eyelid that closes, or a 
thought that springs to birth — I have grown 
to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet 
live in reality a deeper, more human, and more 
universal life than the lover who strangles his 
mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or 
the husband who avenges his honour." 

This excerpt (translated by Alfred Sutro) 
shows the real Maeterlinck, the man whose 
mind is imbued by the strangeness of common 
life, the mystic correspondences, the star in the 
grain of wheat. The philosophy is akin to cer- 
tain passages executed in the allegoric pictures 
of Albrecht Diirer, William Blake, Rossetti, and 
Burne-Jones. 

Each century, he argues, has its own near 
sorrow. It is well that we should sally forth 
in search of our sorrows — the value of our- 
selves is but the value of our melancholy and 
disquiets. The tragic masterpieces of the past 
377 



ICONOCLASTS 

are inferior in the quality of their sorrow com- 
pared to the sorrows of to-day. To-day it is 
fatality that we challenge ; and this is perhaps 
the distinguishing note of the new theatre. It 
is no longer the effects of disaster that arrest 
our attention ; -it is disaster itself ; and we are 
eager to know its essence and its laws. It is 
the rallying point of the most recent dramas, 
the centre of light with strange flames gleaming, 
about which revolve the souls of women and 
men. And a step has been taken toward the 
mystery so that life's mysteries may be looked 
in the face. Between past and future man 
("What is man but a god who is afraid?") 
stands trembling on the tiny oasis of the pres- 
ent. It is the disaster of our existence that we 
fear our soul; did we but allow it to smile 
frankly in its silence and its radiance, we should 
be already living an eternal life. O for those 
"reservoirs of certitudes" on the other side of 
night, "whither the silent herd of souls flock 
every morning to slake their thirst." 

"To every man there come noble thoughts 
that pass his heart like great white birds." 
Then is recalled Browning and his similitude 
of the meanest soul that has its better side 
to show its love. " In life there is no crea- 
ture so degraded but knows full well which is 
the noble and beautiful thing he must do." A 
life perceived is a life transformed. To love 
one's self is to love thy neighbour in thyself ! 
Maeterlinck's attitude toward woman — the true 
378 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

touchstone of philosopher, poet, priest, and artist 

— is beautiful. "I have never met a single 
woman who did not bring to me something 
that was great." 

The spiritual renascence may be at hand. 
It is the theatre that last feels its approach. 
Poetry, painting, sculpture, music, all have 
met it halfway; only the stage lags in the 
rear. Plot, action, trickeries; cheap illusions, 
must be swept away into the limbo of things 
used up. Atmosphere, the atmosphere of un- 
uttered emotions, arrested attitudes, ideas of the 
spiritual subconscious, are to usurp the mechani- 
cal formulas of to-day. The ideal is music — 
music, the archetype of the arts. (Walter Pater 
preached this platonic doctrine.) " It is only the 
words that at first sight seem useless that really 
count in a work." But to realize, to exteriorize 
the mystery, the significance of the soul life, 
what a strange and symbolic web must be woven 
by the poet-dramatist ! He must break with the 
conventions of the past and create something 
that is not quite painting, not quite drama, some- 
thing that is more than poetry, less than music 

— full of ecstasies, silent joys, luminous pauses, 
and the burning fever of the soul that sometimes 
slays. 

It is very beautiful, very ideal — bard, poet, 
mystic, moralist, and playwright, that Maeter- 
linck dared to become. He practised before he 
preached — unlike most men ; and he had the 
slow fortitude of the brave. We know now that 
379 



ICONOCLASTS 

artistically he springs from the loins of Poe and 
Hoffmann ; that Villiers de l'lsle Adam was his 
spiritual godfather ; that by the Belgian's artful 
scale of words he evoked images in our mind 
which recall the harmonies of unheard music; 
that the union of mysticism and freedom of 
thinking lends to his work peculiar eloquence; 
that his device is " Within me there is more," 
a mediaeval inscription borrowed from an old 
doorway in Bruges. He is more revolutionary 
than Ibsen in the matter of technic. Maeter- 
linck writes a play about an open door, a closed 
window, or the vague and disheartening twi- 
lights of cloudy gardens. That he is quite sane 
in his early work we must not assert — since 
when shall art and sanity be driven in easy 
harness ? 

In giving a bare abstract of Maeterlinck's 
theories, spiritual and aesthetic, their beauty and 
nobility, we but clear the way for a better, be- 
cause wider, appreciation of the plays. Let us 
consider them all from The Intruder to Monna 
Vanna and Joyzelle. 

II 

" By mysticism we mean, not the extravagance 
of an erring fancy, but the concentration of rea- 
son in feeling, the enthusiastic love of the good, 
the true, the one, the sense of the infinity of 
knowledge, and of the marvel of the human 
faculties. When feeding upon such thoughts 
380 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

the 'wing of the soul is renewed and gains 
strength, she is raised above the manikins of 
earth ' and their opinions, waiting in wonder to 
know and working with reverence to find out 
what God in this or in another life may reveal 
to her." 

This is not from Maurice Maeterlinck ; it was 
written by a hard-headed man and lovable teacher, 
the late Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of 
Balliol. Not intended as a text, but merely to 
show that the lift of spirit, which is the sign 
manual of mysticism, does not prelude the prac- 
tical. It is a fresh visual angle from which are 
viewed the things of heaven and earthly things. 

In his youth, possibly to escape the sterilities 
of the code — for he was an advocate by profes- 
sion — Maeterlinck took up the mystic writers 
though the drama pulled him hard, as it ever 
does with the preelected. Little danger of this 
ardent young man weighing, as do many, the 
theatre in the scales of commerce. As with 
Ibsen, the stage was an escape for Maeterlinck ; 
it liberated ideas, poetic, dramatic, mystic, which 
had become intolerable, ideas which turned his 
brain. That art of which Pinero so eloquently 
writes, "The great, the fascinating, and most 
difficult art, . . . compression of life without 
falsification," could never have signified a gold 
mine for Maeterlinck as it did for Robert Louis 
Stevenson. To the Belgian it was not a specu- 
lation, but a consecration. To it he brought 
that "concentration of thought and sustained 

381 



ICONOCLASTS 

intensity " which Pinero deems imperative in 
the curriculum of a dramatic artist. 

Upon the anvil of his youthful dreams did 
Maeterlinck forge his little plays for marionettes. 
Shadowy they are, brief transcripts of emotion, 
but valuable in illustrating unity of purpose, of 
mood, of tone. Herein lies their superiority to 
Browning's more elaborate structures. Before he 
ventured into the maze of plotting, Maeterlinck 
was content with simple types of construction. 
The lyric musician in this poet, the lover of 
beauty, led him to make his formula a musical 
one. The dialogue of the first plays seems like 
new species of musical notation. If there is not 
rhyme there is rhythm, interior rhythm, and an 
alluring assonance. Hence we get pages bur- 
dened with repetitions and also the " crossing 
fire " of jewelled words. Apart from their spirit 
the lines of this poet are sonorously beautiful. 
In the "purple" mists of his early manner a 
weaker man might have perished. Not so 
Maeterlinck. He is first the thinker — a thinker 
of strange thoughts independent of their verbal 
settings. He soon escaped preciosity in diction ; 
it was monotony of mood that chained him to 
his many experimentings. 

And therein the old ghost of the Romantics 
comes to life asserting its " claims of the ideal," 
as Ibsen has the phrase. Crushed to dust by 
the hammers of the realists, sneered at in the 
bitter-sweet epigrams of Heine, Romance returns 
to us wearing a new mask. We name this mask 
382 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

Symbolism; but joyous, incarnate behind its shift- 
ing shapes, marches Romance, the Romance of 
1830, the Romance of — Before the Deluge. The 
earth-men, the Troglodytes, who went delving 
into moral sewers and backyards of humanity, 
ruled for a decade and a day ; then the van- 
quished reconquered. In this cycle of art it is 
Romance that comes to us more often, remains 
longer when it does come. 

Maurice Maeterlinck employs the symbol in- 
stead of the sword ; the psyche is his panache. 
His puppets are all poetic — the same poetry as of 
eld informs their gestures and their speech. He 
so fashions them of such fragile pure stuff that 
a phrase maladministered acts as the thrust of a 
dagger. The Idea of Death slays : the blind 
see ; bodies die, but the soul persists ; voices of 
expiring lovers float through vast and shadowy 
corridors — as in Alladine and Palomides — chil- 
dren speak as if their lips had been touched by 
the burning coal of prophecy ; their souls are laid 
bare with a cruel pity ; love is strangled by a 
hair ; we see Death stalk in the interior of a quiet 
home, or rather feel than see ; or in our ears is 
whispered a terrible and sweet tale of the Death 
of Tintagiles — it is all moonlight music, mystery 
with a nightmare finale ; or a tender original 
soul is crushed by the sheer impact of a great 
love hovering near it — Aglavaine and Selysette. 
Then we get fantasy and miracle play, librettos, 
full of charm, wonder, and delicious irony. 
Maeterlinck recalls life, beckons to life, and in 
383 



ICONOCLASTS 

Monna Vanna smashes the stained-glass splen 
dours hemming him in from the world ; and 
behold — we are given drama, see the shock of 
character, and feel the mailed hand of a warrior- 
dramatist. In a dozen years he has traversed a 
kingdom, has grown from wunderkind to mature 
artist, from a poet of few moods to a maker of 
viable drama. 

The chronology of the Maeterlinckian dra- 
matic works is this: Princess Maleine (1889); 
The Intruder, The Blind (1890); The Seven 
Princesses ( 1 89 1 ) ; Pelleas and Melisande ( 1 892) ; 
Alladine and Palomides, Interior, The Death 
of Tintagiles (1894); Aglavaine and Selysette 
(1896); Ariane and Barbe-Bleu, Sister Beatrice 
(1901); Monna Vanna (1902); Joyzelle (1903). 

Though the first attempts are emotional pres- 
entations of ideas, though the dramatic form is, 
from a Scribe standpoint, amateurish, yet the 
unmistakable fla ir of the born dramatist is pres- 
ent. In the beginning Maeterlinck elected to 
mould poetic moods ; later on we shall see him 
a moulder of men and women. 

A thinker may view the visible universe as a 
symbol, as the garment wherewith the gods con- 
ceal themselves ; this Goethe did. Or this globe, 
upon the round of which move sorrowful 
creatures whirled through space from an un- 
thinkable past to an unthinkable future, may be 
apprehended as a phantasmagoria, shot through 
with misery, a cage of dreams, a prison wherein 
the echoes of what has been thought and done 
384 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

meet in cruel confluence within the walls of the 
human brain. All pessimistic cosmogonists, 
poets, dramatists, dwell, with the obsession of 
an idee fixe, upon this scheme of things terres- 
trial. And then there is De Maupassant, an eye, 
which photographed the salient profiles of his 
fellow-beings ; or Poe, who, suffering from an 
incurable disease, felt the horror of the pulse- 
beat, the hideous drama of mere sentience. 
Charles Darwin, with pitiless objectivity, dis- 
plays a map of life whereon the struggle is 
eternal — a struggle from protoplasm to Super- 
Man (the latter a mad idea in a poet's skull). 
Carlyle thunders at the Sons of Belial and we 
shrivel up in the fiery furnace of his eloquent 
wrath ; or John Henry Newman wooes us to 
God with beautiful, gentle speech. To every 
man his illusion. Maeterlinck's is the appre- 
hension of the helplessness of mankind, though 
not its hopelessness. His optimism, the germ of 
which is in the poems, has grown steadily with 
the years. And the tinge of pessimism, of mor- 
bidity, in his earlier productions has vanished in 
the dialectic of his prose. 

Maeterlinck first saw his drama as music — 
this is a contradiction in terms, but it best ex- 
presses the meaning intended. As in music 
there are ebb and flow, rhythmic pulse, so his 
little landscapes unroll themselves with itera- 
tion to the accompaniment of mournful voices. 
No dramatist, ancient or modern, so depends 
upon vocal timbre to embody his dreams as this 

385 



ICONOCLASTS 

one. In reality his characters are voice or 
nothing. From the deeps of haunted gardens 
come these muffled voices, voices suffocated by 
sorrow, poignant voices and sinister. Allusion 
has been made to the Poe-like machinery of 
Maeterlinck — atmosphere. It is, however, only 
external. He works quite differently from Poe, 
and the dekoration with its dreamy forests, skies 
lowering or resonant with sunshine, parks and 
fountains, stretch of sea and dreary moats, is 
but a background for his moods. He pushes 
much farther than Ibsen and Wagner the 
rhythmic correspondences of man and his artis- 
tic environment. But the voice dominates his 
drama, the human voice with all its varied in- 
tonations, its wealth of subtle nuance. 

Instead of the idea-complexity we find in 
Browning, in Maeterlinck the single motif is 
elaborated. He is not polyphonic, — to bor- 
row a musical metaphor, — but monophonic. 
Where he is a psychologist of the most modern 
stamp lies in his perception of the fact that 
there is no longer an autonomous /, the human 
ego is an orchestra of collective egos. We, 
not /, is the burden of our consciousness. 
Through countless ages the vast chemistry of 
the Eternal retort has created a bubble, an atom, 
which says / to itself in daylight, when looking 
in mirrors, but in the dark when the inutile 
noise of life is ceased then the / becomes a 
multitudinous We. All the head hums with 
repercussive memories of anterior existences. 
$86 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

Some call it dreaming ; others nerve-memory ; 
others again — recollection of anterior life. 

Other dramatists have hinted this pantheism 
before Maeterlinck. . Shakespeare was a sym- 
bolist ; so was Ibsen when he penned his The 
Master Builder. But the younger man makes 
a formula of the idea. His is the dramaturgy 
of the subconscious. His people say things 
and thereby reveal their multiple personalities, 
even the colour of their souls. Here, then, is the 
symbolist. To put the case more clearly, let 
Aline Gorren be heard, — a writer who is im- 
bued with the beauty of symbolic ideas : — 

"Your documents, details, verified facts, are pre- 
cisely the least worth considering," says, in effect, the 
Symbolist. " They are appearances • impalpable shad- 
ows of clouds. Nothing^ye think to see is what it 
seems." Nothing outside of our representation exists. 
All visibilities are symbols. Our business is to find 
out what these symbols are. Any book that does not 
directly concern itself with the hints concealed beneatn 
the diversified masks and aspects of matter is a house 
built out of a boy's toy blocks. Science, after promis- 
ing more things than it could fulfil, has many hypothe- 
ses just now that float about one central idea — the 
existence of one essence, infinite in moods, by refer- 
ence to which alone anything whatsoever can be un- 
derstood. Those of our creed only and solely have a 
philosophic basis for their art. 

Emil Verhaeren, Belgian mystic, anarchist, 
poet, sings of The Forest of Numbers in his 
hate-saturated chants, Les Flambeaux Noirs. 
387 



ICONOCLASTS 

je suis l'hallucin^ de la foret des Nombres. 

And was not the greatest mystic of all one 
who saw the image in the fiery bush, one who, 
" in the midway of this our mortal life," found 
himself in a gloomy wood astray — was not 
Dante a supreme symbolist? Life for a man 
of Maeterlinck's temperament is ever a " forest 
of numbers "; with its strange arithmetic he 
hallucinates himself. What is The Intruder 
but a symbol, and one that has enchained the 
attention of man from before the time when the 
Brachycephalic and the Dolichocephalic waged 
war with the cave-bear and murder was cele- 
brated in tribal lays ? Through the ages Death, 
either as a shadowy obstruction or a skeleton 
with scythe and hour-glass, has marched ahead 
of men. Epic and anecdote, canvas and composi- 
tion, have celebrated his ineluctable victories. 
Why then call Maeterlinck morbid for embroider- 
ing the macabre, fascinating theme with new 
variations ! 

Death the Intruder! Always the Intruder. 
In his first little dramatic plaque •, it is the vener- 
able grandfather who is clairvoyant : Death, 
protagonist. Almost imperceptibly the shadow 
steals into the room with the lighted lamp and 
big Dutch clock. The spiritual evidence is 
cumulative ; a series of cunningly worded affir- 
mations, and lo ! Death the Intruder. It is a 
revelation of the technic of atmosphere. Voice 
again is the chief character. 
388 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

The Blind takes us out of doors, though one 
senses the atmosphere of the charnel-house 
under the blue bowl of the unvarying sky. This 
is the most familiar and the most derided of the 
Maeterlinckian plays. It is hardly necessary to 
describe that "ancient Nordland forest," with its 
" eternal look under a sky of deep stars." The 
stage directions of these poems are matchless. 
How depict an " eternal look " ? These exalted 
pictures are but the verbal instrumentation of 
Maeterlinck's motives. They may be imagined, 
never realized. Yet how the settings enhance 
the theme ! These blind old men and women, 
with the lame, the halt, the mad and the sad, 
form a painful tableau in the centre of which 
sits the dead priest, their keeper, their leader, 
without whom they are destined to stumble into 
the slow waters about the island. 

Death the Intruder ! But in this instance an 
intruder who has sneaked in unperceived. The 
discovery is made in semi-tones that mount sol- 
emnly to the apex of a pyramid of woe. This 
little drama is more " arranged " than The 
Intruder ; it does not " happen " so inevitably. 
Interior, called Home by the English translator, 
the lamented poet Richard Hovey, is of similar 
genre to The Intruder. From a coign in an 
old garden planted with willows we see a win- 
dow—a symbol; through this window the 
family may be viewed. Its members are seated. 
All is vague, dreamy. The dialogue occurs 
without. An old man and a stranger discuss 
389 



ICONOCLASTS 

the garden, the family and — the catastrophe. 
Most skilfully the poet marshals his facts — 
hints, pauses, sighs, are the actors in the curious 
puppet-booth. One phrase occurs that is the 
purest Maeterlinck : — 

"Take care," says the old man; "we do not 
know how far the soul extends about men. . . ." 
The denouement is touching. 

From Holbein to Saint-Saens art shows a 
procession of dancing Deaths — always dancing 
with bare bones that creak triumphantly. In 
Maeterlinck's mimings there is something of the 
spirit of Walt Whitman's threnody. 

The Belgian translates the idea of Death into 
phrases more hypnotic than Whitman's. His 
" cool-enfolding Death " is not always " lovely 
and soothing "for the survivors. His cast of 
mind is mediaeval, and presently comes sailing 
into the critical consciousness memories of the 
Pre-Raphaelitic Brotherhood with its strained 
attitudes, its glories of illuminated glass, its 
breathless intensity and concentration upon a 
single theme — above all its apotheosis of the 
symbol and of Death the Intruder. It is one 
more link in the development of our young 
dramatist. He knew Poe and Emerson ; he 
appreciated Rossetti both as poet and painter. 
In the next group of plays under consideration 
a step nearer life may be noted, a stronger ele- 
ment of romance betrays itself. We are ap- 
proaching, though deliberately, Maeterlinck, the 
Romantic. 

390 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 



III 

Israel Zangwill told a story once about Mae- 
terlinck that is curious even if not true. He 
said the Belgian poet, when a young fellow, was 
on one of his nocturnal prowls, and while sitting 
in a cafe* overheard a man explain a new dra 
matic technic to his friend. In it was the germ 
of the Maeterlinck plays. Possibly the plays 
for marionettes, Les Flaireurs, of Charles van 
Lerberghe were a starting-point. The growth 
of the poet on the technical side, as well as the 
evolution from vague, even nebulous thinking to 
the calm, solid philosophy of Wisdom and Des- 
tiny, is set before us in the order of his compo- 
sition. Nor is a laconic dialogue so amazingly 
new. Dumas employed it, and also Hugo. 

The romantic in Maeterlinck began to show 
itself plainly in The Seven Princesses. Death 
is still the motive, but the picture is ampler, the 
frame more decorative. Presently we shall see 
meads and forests, maidens in distress, fountains 
and lonely knights. Movement, though it be a 
mere sinister rustling of dead leaves, is more 
manifest in this transitional period. The Seven 
Princesses is like some ancient morality, with 
the nervous, sonorous, musical setting of a latter- 
day composer. It has a spacious hall of marble, 
with a flight of seven white marble steps ; there 
are seven sleeping maidens ; a silver lamp sheds 
its mysterious glow upon the seven of mystic 

39 1 



ICONOCLASTS 

number (the poet unconsciously recalls those 
other seven sleepers of the early chroniclers), 
and the landscape without the palace — through 
the windows of the terrace is seen the setting 
sun ; the country is dark, marshy, and between 
the huge willows a gloomy canal stretches to 
the horizon. Upon its stagnant waters a man- 
of-war slowly moves. The old King and Queen 
in the terrace note its approach. Here we have 
a prologue full of atmosphere, an enigmatic 
story awaiting its solution. 

We learn from the disjointed dialogue that 
the Prince, the heir apparent, is expected. He 
comes upon the ship. He is welcomed by the 
aged couple — " people are too old without 
knowing it," says the Queen — and the ship 
leaves. Its departure is managed poetically. 
The far-away voices of the sailors are heard in 
monotonous song : " The Atlantic, the Atlantic," 
evokes a feeling of the remote which we feel 
when Vanderdecken's vessel vanishes in The 
Flying Dutchman. This refrain of "The 
Atlantic, the Atlantic, we shall return no more, 
the Atlantic," sets vibrating certain chords of 
melancholy. In the meantime the Prince has 
been regarding the sleepers through the glass 
windows. The Queen, whose premonitions of 
approaching evil are . quite Maeterlinckian, 
points out the beautiful girls, names them. The 
most beautiful of all is Ursula. The Prince 
notices that this Princess does not sleep like 
her sisters. " She is holding one of her hands 
392 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

strangely, . . ." he remarks. "Why has she 
not bound up her hair ? " asks the Queen, dis- 
tractedly. Gradually the little evidences accu- 
mulate. Something is wrong below, there in the 
great hall, where breathlessly sleep the seven 
Princesses on the cushions of pale silk strewn 
upon the marble steps. 

The Prince, after trying to force the window, 
goes through a secret passage and reaches the 
sleepers. The action is supplied by the Queen 
at the window above. She weeps, she beats the 
glass, she says frantic things in the gloom to 
the old King. " Seven little open mouths ! . . . 
Oh, I am sure they are thirsty," she cries. The 
Prince awakens the Princesses — all save one. 
Ursula lies singularly still. " She is not asleep ! 
She is not asleep ! " screams the frantic Queen. 
There is a hurrying to and fro of servitors with 
torches. " Open, open," is the piteous plaint of 
the old woman. Beyond, in the night, is heard the 
chant of the seamen as they fade away into 
the darkness. " The Atlantic, the Atlantic, we 
shall return no more." 

What does it all mean ? What is the hidden 
symbol ? The scene suggests Holland ; yet it 
is no man's land, These dolorous people with 
burning eyes and agitated, feverish gestures — 
who are they ? Poets all. Despite the decora- 
tion, despite the skilful handling of the element 
of suspense, this little fantasy is not for the 
footlights. It is too literary. There is mas- 
tery revealed in the dialogue. The entire piece 
393 



ICONOCLASTS 

recalls a wan Burne-Jones picture with the sym 
phonic accompaniment of Claude Debussy. 

Perhaps it is well that a dramatist is more 
chained to the planet than his brethren, the 
poet, composer, prosatenr. Like the sculptor 
and the architect, the dramatic poet must deal 
with forms that can be apprehended by the 
world. All art is a convention in the last analy- 
sis; theatrical art contains more conventions than 
the rest. Men of an original cast of mind revolt 
at the checks imposed upon their imagination 
by the theatre. But Shakespeare submitted to 
them and, a lesser man, Maeterlinck, has had to 
suffer the pangs of defeat. But he has left his 
imprint upon the page of the French drama in 
his disregard of the stage carpentry of Scribe 
and Sardou. Above all, he has imparted to the 
contemporaneous theatre new poetic ideas. A 
new technic — on the material side — is of less 
importance than the introduction of new modes 
of expression, of atmosphere, of ideas. 

Maeterlinck, after his early essays in a domain 
that is more poetical than dramatic, we find 
longing for the romantic. He tires of single 
figures painted upon a small canvas. (Faguet 
once called him the " Henner of literature.") 
He longs for more space, more characters, more 
action — in a word — variety. We get it in his 
next attempt, Alladine and Palomides. In it 
there is less music, but more action — withal, it 
is naively childish. Alladine is loved by Abla- 
more. He is an old king, reigning over a castle 
394 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

surrounded by crazy moats. His beloved is 
very young. When the knightly Palomides ap- 
pears, they mutually love. The King is a phi- 
losopher. Listen : " Now I have recognized that 
misfortune itself is of better worth than sleep, 
and that there must be a life more active and 
higher than waiting. . . ." There is an avenue 
of fountains that unfolds before the windows — 
wonderful, weariless. Ablamore interrogates 
Alladine after she has encountered Palomides. 
Does she regard the weariless , fountains alone ? 
He soon lays bare the child soul of this maiden. 
Ablamore wishes Palomides to marry his daugh- 
ter Astolaine. He goes mad with jealousy and 
casts the lovers into a dungeon, a trick dungeon, 
where marvels occur : a sea that is a sky, move- 
less flowers. The pair embrace. Death is nigh 
— " there is no kissing twice upon the heart of 
death." Finally they are engulfed. Rescued, 
they die in separate chambers of the palace, from 
which the aged King has fled. Voices are the 
only actors in the last scene. 

Mediaeval, too, in its picturesque quality is 
The Death of Tintagiles with its five short acts 
of despairing sister love. The little Tintagiles 
is the king that is to be. His grandmother, a 
demented old woman, suffers from a mania 
which takes the form of aggressive jealousy. 
She is ancient on her throne — in what strange 
land does she reign ? — and she seeks to assassi- 
nate the poor little boy. Ygraine and Bellangere, 
his sisters, thwart her desires for a time — but 
395 



ICONOCLASTS 

only for a short time. He is eventually kid- 
napped and murdered. This simple, old-world 
fairy story — all Maeterlinck has a tang of 
the supernatural — is treated exquisitely. The 
arousing of pity for the doomed child is almost 
Shakespearian. These children of Maeterlinck 
are his own creation. No one, with the exception 
of Dostoievsky and Hauptmann, approaches him 
in unfolding the artless secrets of the childish 
heart. Like plucked petals of a white virginal 
flower, the little soul is exposed. And there is 
no taint of precocious sexuality as in Dosto'fev- 
sky's studies of childhood (Les Pr^coces and 
others). Hauptmann's Hannele, among modern 
figures of girlhood, alone matches the Belgian. 
Hannele is nearer the soil than Tintagiles or 
the little Yniold. 

" There seems to be a watch set for the ap- 
proach of the slightest happiness," laments 
Ygraine as she holds Tintagiles by the hand. 
They live in a tower that stands in an amphi- 
theatre of shadows. It is in the valley. The 
air does not seem to go down so low. The walls 
of the tower are cracking. " You would say it 
was dissolving in the shadows." There the 
grandmother Queen resides. "They say she is 
not beautiful and that she is growing huge." 
There is something monstrous in this hint of 
her size — as though a black, dropsical spider 
sat in the dark weaving the murderous webs for 
passing flies. Only the fly in this case is her 
grandson. Into the " sickening castle " go the 
39<5 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

"little sad King" and his sisters. Bellangere 
relates that smothered voices reached her in one 
of the strange corridors. They spoke of a child 
and a crown of gold. She did not understand, 
" for it was hard to hear, and their voices were 
sweet." Enough, however, to put the sisters on 
their guard. 

In their sleeping room they bar the doors. 
An old retainer is with them. At the end of 
the act a door is slowly pushed open. They 
exert all their force to keep it closed. The 
old man puts his sword through the opening ; it 
snaps. The room grows colder as the door, 
worked by unseen means, opens. Then Tinta- 
giles utters a piercing cry. The door closes. 
They are saved — for a time. Act IV gives us 
the corridor in front of the room wherein hide 
the boy and his sisters. The handmaids of the 
vile old Queen chatter. It is near midnight. 
Sleep has overtaken the hapless victims. The 
handmaids steal Tintagiles, and the scene ends 
in screams. But the last act gives us sensations 
of the direst sort, because its terrors are felt and 
not seen. It is nearly all monologue. Only 
an actress of superior tragic power could do jus- 
tice to this intense episode. A great iron door 
is seen. Ygraine, haggard, dishevelled, enters, 
lamp in hand. She has tracked her darling to 
this awful spot. " I found all these golden curls 
along the steps and along the walls ; and I fol- 
lowed them. I picked them up. . . . Oh ! oh ! 
They are very beautiful. . . . They say the 
397 



ICONOCLASTS 

shadows poison. . . . Ah ! Still more golden 
curls shut in the door. . . . Tintagiles ! " 

Then a tiny knock is heard — the bruised fists 
of Tintagiles on the other side of the massive 
door. " Sister Ygraine, sister Ygraine," he calls. 
He tells her he escaped from the monster. He 
struck her — struck her! Poe-like he exclaims, 
" Open quickly ... for the love of dear God, 
sister Ygraine." You feel the hideous woman 
approaching. " She is breathing behind me," 
moans the child as the fat, panting devil reaches 
him, an obscene shape of terror. " She ... is 
taking me by the throat. ..." Ygraine, frantic, 
without, hears the fall of a little body and bursts 
into despairing invectives. " Let me be punished 
some other way. . . . There are so many things 
that could give me more pain ... if thou lovest 
to give pain." 

I confess that the condensed bitterness and 
woe and cruelty of this last act border on the 
pathologic if we do not consider the symbol. I 
would rather hear the beautiful symphonic poem 
of Charles Martin Loeffler based upon the poetic 
impressions of this piece — the art of music gives 
us the "pathos of distance." Yet Maeterlinck's 
Death of Tintagiles is in form and style far 
above his previous efforts. His marionettes 
are beginning to modulate into flesh and blood, 
and, like the mermaid of the fairy story, the 
transformation is a painful one. 

We note this modulation particularly in Pelleas 
and Melisande. First played in English by 
398 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

Forbes Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, 
the play made a mixed impression in London ; 
though it may be confessed that, despite the 
scenic splendour, the translation and the acting 
transposed to a lower, realistic key this lovely 
drama of souls. There is no play of Maeter- 
linck's so saturated in poesy, so replete with 
romance. The romantic in Maeterlinck has 
here full sway. There are episodes as intense 
as the second act of Tristan and Isolde. One 
expects to hear King Marke's distant, tremulous 
hunting horns in the forest scene of the fourth 
act, where Pelleas and Melisande uncover their 
secret. 

The plot is not a densely woven one. In the 
woods while hunting in a land east of the sun 
and west of the moon, Golaud, a king's son, 
comes upon Melisande sitting disconsolate at 
the brink of a spring. She is timid and would 
flee. Something has happened to her which 
she does not explain, perhaps remember. She 
is lost, she declares, with the passionate itera- 
tion which has become a fixed pattern in the 
Maeterlinck dialogue. She has dropped into 
the pool the gold crown some one gave her — 
who it was she never tells. A forlorn little prin- 
cess out of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy 
tale. Golaud marries her offhand and brings 
her to his home, the castle of his grandfather, 
Arkel, King of Allemonde. There his father 
lies dying — we never see this shadowy invalid 
— and his brother Pelleas lives. Also Little 
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ICONOCLASTS 

Yniold, son of Golaud, by a former marriage. 
The castle is malarial, rickety, like many of 
Maeterlinck's buildings. Nearly all his people 
seem to suffer from swampy emanations or the 
mephitic gas of ancient dungeons. The evil 
odours of ArkeTs abode are even alluded to in 
this play. 

Pelleas and Melisande love. Golaud suspects 
it, and his jealousy, mixing with his love for 
brother and wife, is delineated masterfully. We 
now begin to see the fruits of the dramatist's 
careful study of moods. Evanescent as are the 
moods of the previous plays, they served as 
spiritual gymnastics. With them he proved his 
ability to portray the finer shades of terror, re- 
morse, love, despair. In the jealousy of Golaud 
he takes a step nearer the concrete. Golaud is 
a hunter, a man whose temples are touched by 
gray. He adores his child-wife and trusts her. 
He begs the moody Pelleas to wait upon her. 
His marriage with her has surprised all, save 
his grandfather. Arkel says : — 

" He has done what he probably must have 
done. I am very old, and nevertheless I have 
not yet seen clearly for one moment into myself ; 
how would you that I judge what others have 
done?" A wonderful man, indeed. Pelleas 
wishes to visit his dying friend Marcellus — 
the Shakespeare nomenclature persists — but 
Arkel begs him to stay at home, where death 
approaches. 

Melisande is well received by the King and 
400 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

Queen. She is astonished at the gloom of the 
gardens, and is pleased with the spectacle of 
the sea. In the ending of Act I we get a faint 
premonition of disaster. Pelleas and Melisande 
watch the departure of the ship that brought 
Melisande. (Maeterlinck here borrows an early 
effect from The Seven Princesses.) It flies 
away under full sail. 

Pelleas. Nothing can be seen any longer on the 
sea. . . o 

Melisande. I see more lights. 

Pelleas. It is the other lighthouses. . . . Do you 
hear the sea ? It is the wind rising. Let us go down 
this way. Will you give me your hand ? 

Melisande. See, see, my hands are full. 

Pelleas. I will hold you by the arm ; the road is 
steep and it is very gloomy there. ... I am going 
away, perhaps, to-morrow. . . . 

Melisande. Oh 1 . . . Why do you go away ? 

[Curtain. 

Much sport has been made of the first scene 
in this play. Yet it only displays the poet's 
worship of Shakespeare. Maid-servants are 
discovered at the castle gate. They gabble as 
they knock for admission. It is as prosaic as 
the rest of the work is poetic. A porter of the 
"Anon, anon, I come" type holds parley. He 
is borrowed from Macbeth. However, it does 
not demand a close reading of this episode to 
discover that it sounds the keynote to music — 
always symbolical — of the drama that follows. 
401 



ICONOCLASTS 



IV 



The second act of Pelleas and Melisande 
begins at an immemorial fountain in the royal 
park. Here the young Prince sits with the wife 
of his brother. Melisande is one of the poet's 
most successful full-length portraits. She is 
exquisitely girlish, is charming with her strange 
Undine airs, and is touched by a singular atmos- 
phere of the remote. Hauptmann has realized 
the same ethereal type in Rautendelein. Me- 
lisande is very romantic. At times she is on the 
point of melting into the green tapestry of the 
forest. She is a woodland creature. More 
melancholy than Miranda, she is not without 
traces of her high-bred temperament; less real 
than Juliet, she seems quite as passion-smitten. 
Not altogether a comprehensible creation, Me- 
lisande piques one at every reading, with her 
waywardness, her infantile change of moods. 

At the spring the two converse of the water 
and its healing powers — " You would say that 
my hands were sick to-day," she murmurs as 
she dips her hand into the pool. She loses her 
wedding ring. The conversation is all as in- 
direct, as elliptical, as Robert Browning or 
Henry James. Let it be said that the affecta- 
tion of understanding Browning at all points is 
not so banal as the pretence of not understand- 
ing Maeterlinck. The symbol floats like a flag 
in his dramas. 

In the interim Golaud has been wounded 
402 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

while hunting. It is not serious, but it un- 
looses the heart of Melisande, who confesses 
that she, too, is ill. With her habitual avoid- 
ance of the definite, she does not, or will not, 
tell her husband the cause of her vague un- 
rest and spiritual nostalgia. The interview is 
affecting. Golaud, the middle-aged, cannot over- 
hear the shell-like murmurings of this baby soul. 
She recounts the loss of her wedding ring, but 
prevaricates. Golaud bids her go search for it 
in company with Pelleas — always Pelleas. In 
a grotto the two again meet. The cave is full 
of " blue darks," and outside the moon has "torn 
through a great cloud." Suddenly three sleep- 
ing beggars are discovered (again a recurrence 
to the earlier style). They mean something, of 
course, though they do not awaken. In certain 
pages of Maeterlinck it is well to let sleeping 
symbols lie undisturbed. The action now moves 
apace. Pelleas, fearing danger, wishes to fly, but 
is dissuaded by his grandfather. 

In Act III Pelleas and Melisande sit and con- 
verse. Little Yniold, with his curious child's brain 
and child's candour, really discovers to the lovers 
their mutual love. It is done captivatingly. 

" You have been weeping, little mother," he 
says to his mother, in his father's presence. 
" Do not hold the lamp under their eyes so," 
responds Golaud. Then follows the poetic and 
famous scene of Melisande on the tower comb- 
ing her unbound locks and singing in the moon- 
light. It is a magical picture. One recalls 
403 



ICONOCLASTS 

Lilith, that first wife of Adam, painted by 
Rossetti, who also combed dangerous silken 
tresses Pelleas enters, and the ensuing duo- 
logue is rich in tenderness and amorous poetry. 
One in vain endeavours to recall so intensely 
vivid a scene in literature since Romeo and 
Juliet. The romance of the French Romantics 
always verged on the melodramatic and arti- 
ficial, and the stately classics are not happy in 
moments of this kind. The similar scene in Cy- 
rano, when compared to Pelleas and Melisande, 
is mere rococo pasteboard, though theatrically 
effective. Rostand is, at his best, Orientally 
sentimental, as befits his blood ; he is never truly 
poetic, for he is a winning rhetorician, a " rhymr 
ing Sardou," rather than a dramatic poet. 

The mad apostrophe to the hair of Melisande 
is in key with the entire setting of this moving 
tableau. " I have never seen such hair as thine, 
Melisande. I see the sky no longer through 
thy locks. . . . They are alive like birds in my 
hands." Even the surprising of the lovers by 
the sleepless husband has nothing theatric in it. 
He tells them that they are children — "what 
children ! " — and bids Melisande not to lean so 
far out of her window. In the next scene we 
see him with Pelleas in the vaults of the castle. 
There is something evil in his heart ; in the brain 
of Maeterlinck there was Poe when he wrote 
this episode. Golaud leads Pelleas through the 
vault. Pelleas almost stumbles into an abyss — 
his brother has made a misstep. We feel our- 
404 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

selves listening here on the brink of a catas- 
trophe that does not happen. It recalls Poe's 
Cask of Amontillado. 

A painful scene is the questioning of little 
Yniold by his father. He asked the boy what 
Melisande and Pelleas talked of when together ; 
asked of their movements. Then he lifts his 
son to the window and bids him look on and 
report. It is masterly in its cruel directness. 
" Are they near each other ? " he demands. 
" No, little father." Other even more searching 
questions follow, and when the unfortunate spy 
is clutched in a fierce grip he cries, " Ah, ah ! 
little father, you have hurt me." Unconsciously 
Golaud has betrayed his woful agitation. 

Melisande is pitied by Arkel. She replies 
that she is not unhappy. He responds, " Perhaps 
you are of those who are unhappy without know- 
ing it." Golaud enters and reproaches her, seizes 
her hair. Her consternation is great. She 
gives vent to that sentence which in England 
convulsed a matter-of-fact audience. " I am not 
happy. I am not happy ! " The foredoomed 
lovers meet in the park. It is the great scene 
of the piece. Again one must go to Tristan 
and Isolde, for the lyric passion has the quality 
of intense music ; that Tristan and Pell6as, of 
which Jean Marnold wrote so acutely in the 
Mercnre de France : — 

Tristan est l'ceuvre maitresse du musicien Wagner. 
C'est le defi de son ge"nie au temps. II eut pu disparaitre 
apres sans craindre Toubli ou diminuer sa gloire. Mais ce 
405 



ICONOCLASTS 

cype ideal du drame wagne'rien, de Taveu meme du reforma 
ieur, ce modele de Poeuvre d'art de Tavenir apparait quasi 
ment impossible au theatre. S'il y assomme les de'vots de 
lopera conventionnel, son poeme ahurit, lasse ou blesse 
les receptivites plus exigeantes. Nous savons, depuis 
Pelleas, que la vraie vie n'est pas forcdment incompatible 
avec la scene lyrique ; qu'un drame poignant y peut s'enro- 
ber de quelque symbole et s'atourner de romantisme, sans 
cesser d'etre humain. Nous y vlmes une action simple 
emplir une soiree sans chevilles, des amants s'enoncer sans 
boursouflure, s'aimer sans philtre et sans charades, et mourir 
sans grandiloquence. Le pathos de Tristan vient trop tard ; 
si tard, qu'il semble aujourd'hui a sa place adequate en 
notre Opera toulousain. 

What Claude Debussy has done with this meet- 
ing in his music drama Paris knows. Speech 
here in its rhapsodic rush becomes music. And 
it is all poetic drama of the loftiest character, 
dealing with material as old as Eve. The hus- 
band enters, slays his brother, and the curtain 
falls on Melisande fleeing, pursued by Golaud, 
sword in hand. 

The fifth act of this play with its depiction of 
agony in the stern soul of Golaud, its death of 
Melisande, who dies of a broken heart, is the 
tragedy of souls distraught. Even on cold 
paper it is emotion-breeding. Arkel, as the 
spokesman for Fate, bids his son not to trouble 
the last moments of Melisande. She has given 
birth to a tiny image of herself, and, quite 
frightened by the world she has lived in, she 
leaves it like a bird scared to sudden flight. She 
has loved, though it is not with the " guilty " 
love her husband supposed. He hovers over 
406 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

her couch, awaiting the words that will satisfy 
his egotistic passion. 

" She must not be disturbed," urges the 
venerable Arkel. " The human soul is very 
silent. . . . The human soul likes to depart 
alone. ... It suffers so timorously. . . . But 
( the sadness, Golaud. . . . The sadness of all 
we see. . . . 'Twas a little being, so quiet, so 
fearful, and so silent. 'Twas a poor little mys- 
terious being like everybody." . . . 

Aglavaine and Selysette is more shadowy in its 
treatment than Pelleas and Melisande, and no 
doubt to the lovers of the " precious " in Maeter- 
linck more interesting than Monna Vanna. It 
deals with the love of two women, Aglavaine 
and Selysette, for Meleandre. The delicacy of 
technic displayed is almost inconceivable, and 
the note of irony, faint as it is, enters a new 
element in this spiritual duel. To be brief, 
Aglavaine is the mouthpiece for Maeterlinck in 
his Treasure of the Humble. She is an esprit 
fort, who attracts the husband of Selysette by 
her beauty of soul, vigour of brain, and tempera- 
mental intensity. Poor Selysette is crushed 
between the upper and nether millstone of the 
man and woman. They both love her devotedly, 
but being of the Melisande type, in her sweet, 
submissive nature, she fades away until death, 
self-sought, comes. She has a fragrant soul, 
and its fragrance exhales itself on her deathbed. 
The dynamics of love prove too much for this 
creature. There is tragic pathos in her taking 
407 



ICONOCLASTS 

off, and Maeterlinck is at his best in delineating 
the tower, with its crumbling walls, the wheeling 
birds frightened by the apparition of a falling 
body, and the terror and alarm of the little sister. 
Less, much less, fitted for theatrical representa- 
tion than Pelleas and Melisande, this drama is 
charged with symbolism and with rather too 
severe strain for its poetic build — too much 
intellectual freightage. It was composed after 
the essays, and it is because of this, perhaps, 
that I find Aglavaine just a trifle doctrinaire. 
There is wise and charming talk, the action nil. 
We get instead etats cT antes. The two women 
expand before our eyes ; it is a rare spiritual 
growth, psychology in the veritable sense of that 
overworked word. Yet the friendship of Agla- 
vaine slays Selysette. There is mystery, beauty, 
of a high order in the play, and in some things it 
betrays a distinct advance upon its predecessors. 
Sister Beatrice and Ardiane and Barbe Bleu 
are librettos for music. The first is a delightful 
setting of that old Dutch legend made famil- 
iar to English readers by John Davidson in 
his The Ballad of a Nun. There are homely 
pathos and mystic exaltation in Maeterlinck's 
interpretation of this nun, who left her convent 
for the love of man, only to return, decades 
later, wrecked in body and soul. But her ab- 
sence has not been missed, for the Virgin Mary 
has stepped down from her niche in the hall 
and played the role of porteress disguised as 
the runaway. 

408 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

Ardiane married Bluebeard and falls, like the 
rest of his wives, into the trap set for them. 
She defies the monster, and with the help of the 
peasants rescues them all from the marvellous 
dungeons under the castle. But she goes forth 
into the world alone — oh, irony of ironies ! — 
the others do not care to be rescued. The story 
is told with charm and brilliancy. The author 
discovers himself as a conteur with a light, grace- 
ful, humorous touch. It is an ideal libretto — 
for an ideal composer. The Miracle of Saint 
Antony is a comedy which was first seen at 
Brussels, October, 1903. It is a " satire of bour- 
geois society," and was well received. 



Monna Vanna was produced at the Nouveau 
Theatre, Paris, May 17, 1902. In the cast 
were Georgette Leblanc, Jean Froment, Dar- 
mont, Lugne-Poe, and others. The drama had 
an immediate success and has been played over 
the continent. In London, which will stand 
any amount of coarseness, so it be forthright 
and brutal, a public performance was forbidden 
to Monna Vanna. 

The action of this sombre, fascinating drama 
is laid at Pisa near the close of the fifteenth 
century. The city is beleaguered by the army 
of Prinzevalle sent from Florence. Within, the 
city has made desperate but ineffectual resist- 
ance; ammunition and food have given out 
409 



ICONOCLASTS 

A few hours and the city will be in the hands 
of the enemy, will be subject to sack, rapine, 
slaughter. Guido Colonna is at his wits' ends. 
In the first act we find him in consultation with 
his lieutenants. His father, Marco Colonna, 
scholar, virtuoso, and philosopher, has been sent 
to the camp of Prinzevalle. Thence he returns, 
and in a scene of power and suspense he informs 
his son of the terms set forth by the conqueror. 
There is but one way out of the trouble. With 
rage, horror, incredulity, Guido Colonna hears 
that if his wife, the high-born beauty, Giovanna 
(Monna Vanna), goes to the tent of the bar- 
barian captain, Prinzevalle, the siege will be ter- 
minated. 

His Vanna? Why? Who is this demon out 
of the nethermost hell that can formulate sucK 
a vile condition? The father calmly explains. 
Prinzevalle is not a barbarian, but a Hercules in 
strength and beauty. He is cultivated. He has 
never seen Vanna. He desires the unknown. He 
has the thirst for the infinite which characterizes 
great dreamers, poets, generals, madmen of the 
ideal. If Monna Vanna is sent to his tent, a living 
sacrifice, in return he will give bread, meat, wine, 
gunpowder, arms, to the starving, vanquished city. 
Guido laughs at such an insane offer. Marco tells 
him that the city council knows of it — that — yes, 
Vanna has heard it. She is at that moment com- 
ing to speak to her husband. He is stupefied to 
learn that the council has spurned the offer. But 
Vanna has to be counted with. 
410 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

Her decision that, Judith-like, she will go forth 
to this Holophernes, maddens her husband be- 
yond endurance. In an exciting scene he 
accuses her of knowing Prinzevalle, of being 
unfaithful to her marriage vows in thought. 
He loads his father with opprobrium. The 
curtain falls on Vanna as she leaves, Guido 
telling her that she will never return to him the 
same. 

Act II : Tent of Prinzevalle. We have ad- 
mirable opportunities to study the man's charac- 
ter, virile, upright, fearless, poetic, melancholy, 
through his interviews with his faithful secretary 
and Trivulzio, the emissary of the Florentine 
government. The siege has lasted too long; 
Prinzevalle has waxed too powerful, a conspir- 
acy has been formed against him. He is to be 
deposed, assassinated. He finds all this in his 
conversation with the lying, base Trivulzio. 
The episode has an antique quality. Trivulzio 
attempts an attack, but is easily repulsed, though 
he receives a slight wound in the face, warning 
Prinzevalle meanwhile that by daybreak he will 
be deposed, ruined. There is nothing left then 
but the improbable acceptance by Guido Colonna 
and his virtuous spouse of the hard condition 
he has imposed upon them. 

She approaches. She has been saluted by 
the sentries. Prinzevalle is amazed. She is 
enveloped in a long cloak — beneath it she is a 
Lady Godiva. The meeting is one of the most 
curious in dramatic literature. Gustave Flat* 
411 



ICONOCLASTS 

bert had anticipated it in Salammbo, but the 
daughter of Hamilcar was a barbarian, after all, 
and Matho's love for her brutal. The souls of 
Maeterlinck's pair are set before us with clear- 
ness, force, and solemnity. The aptitude for 
dissection of motive displayed by the poet in his 
previous work is revealed here with splendid 
results. It is all natural — as natural as such a 
situation can be — and the dismay of the noble 
woman is mitigated somewhat when she dis- 
covers Prinzevalle has known her, has always 
loved her, that he means her no harm. By 
degrees she extorts the truth from him. 

He is the playmate of her happiest hours ; 
for her he has moved mountains. Fresh from 
the insulting insinuations of her husband, her 
head aflame with her exalted mission, she begins 
to see her life as it really is. No, she does not 
precipitate herself into his arms ! The transi- 
tion is infinitely more subtle than could be 
accomplished by most modern playwrights. It 
is atmospheric. The dialogue leads us through 
the avenues of this strangely reunited couple. 
He is all passion and tenderness. She — curi- 
osity has given way to remembrance. At the 
end he goes to Pisa with her, her captive ; while 
radiant, unharmed, she hastes to her husband 
and fellow-countrymen. The promised stores 
have been sent; Prinzevalle deserts the cause 
of Florence — he is not a Florentine, and as his 
life is in danger his defection may be pardoned. 
And he loves. Stella Hohenfels in this scene 
412 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

quite surpassed herself at the Hofburg Theatre, 
Vienna, where I witnessed a capital performance 
of the play in 1903, with Joseph Kainz, Reimers, 
and others in the cast. 

Daring as is this act, the next outgenerals it 
in surprises. Vanna marches through the re- 
joicing city, lighted as for a feast. She is con- 
ducted as a conqueror to her husband. Then 
begins the struggle. He repulses her, heaping 
upon her vile phrases. Yes, she has saved 
Pisa, but how ? Where is the honour of the 
Colonna ? She implores, explains, denies, 
affirms. But when Guido learns the name of 
the silent warrior who has accompanied her, his 
rage is boundless. It is her lover that she hales 
back as a slave to show her triumph. There is 
enough meat in this act to furnish forth a gross 
of modern nerveless, boneless, bloodless abor- 
tions of drama now before the footlights. As a 
specimen of the romantic drama with the accom- 
paniment of a profound psychology, Monna 
Vanna makes modern French works of the 
papier-mache* type droop like fresh flowers in a 
thunderstorm. 

Incredulously the infuriated husband hears 
that Prinzevalle has made no advances to Vanna. 
It is too much. Why, then, is he here? he 
demands. He claims the head of Prinzevalle. 
Vanna jumps into the mob of soldiers, crying 
that she has lied, lied abominably. Prinzevalle 
seized her, she declares, and to defend herself 
she has wounded him. Behold his face — which 
413 



ICONOCLASTS 

shows the marks of his struggle with the Flor- 
entine emissary, Trevulzio. 

It is a striking situation. In the heyday of 
his glory Sardou never devised anything more 
theatrically effective — setting aside considera- 
tion of the psychologic imbroglio. Vanna then 
claims Prinzevalle as her spoils of war. To the 
victor belongs the vanquished. Colonna, de- 
spite Prinzevalle's assertion that Vanna's lie is 
another lie, is handed over to the care of Van- 
na's people. In a swift " aside " she commands 
silence. She loves him, she whispers. Marco 
understands — understands the manner in which 
Vanna will be revenged upon Prinzevalle and 
also upon her husband for his disbelief. The 
latter now disclaims his former doubts. Let 
her work her vengeance upon the man she 
has captured. But for her all that has gone be- 
fore in her entire life is as a bad dream. The 
real, the beautiful life, the dream, is at hand. 
It will be her revenge. She must go at once 
to her prisoner, to Prinzevalle in his cell — the 
curtain falls. 

There are weak spots in the scheme which 
tax one's credulity. Something of the improb- 
able must be granted a dramatist be he never so 
logical. The rapid mental change of Vanna 
hints at a nature naturally casuistical, as were 
no doubt many Italians of the Renascence. 
Her love for Colonna could never have been 
deep-rooted. But she did not betray him, and 
yet she has been adjudged profoundly immoral 
414 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

— in a word, not to put too fine an edge upon 
the sophistries of the situation, this heroine com- 
mitted an imaginative infidelity as well as tell- 
ing a falsehood. The madness of the finale is 
but the logical outcome of her love for Prinze- 
valle. Few plays, however, reveal their complete 
essence in the mere reading. And the cryptic 
stammering, the arrested spasms, of Maeter- 
linck's earlier style vanish quite in the action of 
Monna Vanna. 

I have dwelt perhaps to lengths upon the 
spiritual development of the man, — those who 
run may follow his material progress, — but the 
reason is simple : the soul of Maeterlinck is in 
his plays. That he is a creative thinker is not 
asserted. He has studied deeply the wisdom of 
the ancients, of the moderns. He knows Emer- 
son and Moliere. He knows Saint Teresa and 
John of the Cross. Conceive an artistic tempera- 
ment that seeks the phrase for itself as did Wal- 
ter Pater ; that loves the soul of humanity as did 
Robert Browning ; that seeks a dramatic synthe- 
sis for his poetry, philosophy, rhetoric — and 
you have this man. His Flemish fond may 
account for his mystic temperament, for his 
preoccupation with things of the spirit, and yet 
how difficult it is to place the critical finger on 
this quality and that quality, as if on the bumps 
of the phrenologist, and say — here is the real 
Maurice Maeterlinck ! 



415 



ICONOCLASTS 



VI 



Passers-by on the Boulevard, the summer of 
1903, stared at the Gymnase Theatre, which 
bore the inscription : Le Theatre Maeterlinck. 
Certainly such an institution as the Maeterlinck 
Theatre was undreamed of a decade ago by the 
poet's most fanatical adherents. 

However, there it stood, this affiche ; and there 
it stood the night I stumbled through the semi- 
obscurity of the well-known house to my loge. 
The criticisms of the new play had not been re- 
assuring ; a second Monna Vanna was not to be 
expected ; a return to Maeterlinck's earlier man- 
ner was unthinkable, so I confess that I awaited 
the parting of the curtains with a fair amount 
of curiosity. I was not disappointed when the 
first scene disclosed a loggia of a Renascence 
palazzo. This setting sounded the keynote — 
and a very beautiful, delicate note it was, for the 
author has been as careful in the mounting of 
this play as he was indifferent in his first essays. 
Signor Rovescalli of Milan had carried out the 
designs of Charles Doudelet with fidelity and 
taste. The Pinturicchio costumes are all from 
the same hands. Nothing — except the lighting 
— has been omitted that might add to the in- 
carnation of this dream — for a dream play 
Joyzelle is, full of strange hypnotic action and 
phrases that haunt. 

The piece, which is called a Conte d'Amour, 
is in five short acts. It is confined to four char- 
416 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

acters, two of which carry the slight thread of 
story. In style it is midway between Maeter- 
linck's earlier manner and Monna Vanna. It 
might, if considered in historic sequence, have 
been written before Monna Vanna, and thus 
could have furnished the link between the static 
and the dynamic theatre of this poet. Coming 
after the Italian tragedy of hot blood, it seems 
like a casting back to an earlier manner. But it 
is not. There is more action than in any play, 
— Vanna excepted, — more than in Pelleas and 
Melisande. There are passion and climax that 
come perilously nearer theatricalism than any- 
thing Maeterlinck has yet written, though he 
steers around the banal, avoiding it by a hair- 
breadth. Admirers of the dramatist's repressed 
style must have taken a deep .breath as the epi- 
sode of the attempted assassination developed 
into something quite unexpected. 

Joyzelle is little more than a series of situa- 
tions, in which the heroine is tested by the stern 
old enchanter Merlin. When I called upon the 
poet at his picturesque little house in Passy, I 
asked him about The Tempest, which the critics 
one and all saw in his play. He smiled and 
replied that Shakespeare was a good point of 
departure. Could there be a better one ? The 
resemblance is rather superficial. Prospero and 
Miranda are, in the mysterious island of Maeter- 
linck, Merlin and Lanceor — the latter the magi- 
cian's son ; and Joyzelle is, if you will, a female 
Ferdinand come to woo the youth. 
417 



ICONOCLASTS 

The changes to be rung on such a theme are 
not a few. But Maeterlinck has elected to intro- 
duce a new and more disturbing element. It is 
Arielle, the subconscious nature of Merlin, who 
always warns him of impending danger. Instead 
of the old-fashioned soliloquy, we are given, be- 
cause of this dualism, dialogues between Merlin 
and his subliminal self. This sounds terribly 
metaphysical, but as treated by Maeterlinck 
Merlin's alter ego — his doppelganger, as the Ger- 
man mystics have it — is a charming young 
woman attired in gray and purple, minor in key. 
If she is his constant mentor, he has also 
the power of projecting her into the visible 
world — materializing, the spiritualists call it; 
and as Klingsor tempted Parsifal by transform- 
ing Kundry into a seductive shape, so Merlin 
uses Arielle as an agent of temptation against 
his son, his weak and handsome Lanceor. 

The plot is slight. Love, a very passionate, 
earthly love, is the theme. Doubtless Maeter- 
linck intends the entire conte as a symbol; 
theatre-goers will be more interested in its ex- 
ternal garb. Briefly, Merlin interrogates the 
sleeping Arielle and learns that his son Lanceor, 
who has just arrived on the island, is at the 
crisis of his life. "Le destin de ton fils est 
inscrit tout entier dans un cercle d'amour." 
He is condemned by the Fates to die within the 
month if he does not find a perfect love, and to 
this love all is permitted, even crime. If the 
girl upon whom he casts his eyes will sacrifice 
418 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

all for her love, then happiness will be his porticn 
We are plunged into a fairy land at the first 
words of Merlin. This gift of evoking an atmos- 
phere in a few phrases is Maeterlinck's own. 
All resemblance to Shakespeare's folk vanishes 
as the scheme is unfolded. At first we see 
Merlin addressing Arielle. When she sleeps 
he loses his force and so he awakens her. After 
learning Lanceor's destiny, he resolves to be on 
his guard. Joyzelle is cast up by the sea, and, 
encountering Lanceor, the inflammable pair fall 
madly in love with each other. Nothing can 
come between, or if any one does — ! Lanceor 
is more assured than Joyzelle that this is his first, 
his perfect passion. But Merlin, who pretends 
anger, as does Prospero, resolves to test the 
newly kindled flame. He threatens to kill Joy- 
zelle if she meets Lanceor, but she defies him, 
and refuses to bind herself to any promise im- 
posed upon her. To a sonorous and emphatic 
Non ! the curtain intervenes. 

Merlin now devises a series of tests for his 
son. Like Marco Colonna in Monna Vanna, 
he would be cruel only to be kind. The first 
is the trial by separation. In a lonely tower 
Lanceor is found by Joyzelle. The place is as 
forbidding as the country of Browning's Childe 
Roland. Joyzelle calls to Lanceor, who rushec 
to her arms. As they embrace each other, 
trees put on full bloom, flowers carpet the 
ground, and all nature bursts into life — 
2nly the order of decay and bloom is reversed 
419 



ICONOCLASTS 

Then Merlin has Lanceor bitten by a serpent, 
and falling into a magic slumber Arielle appears, 
and he finds her instead of Joyzelle, who has 
been sternly sent away. She returns only to 
find her lover desperately enamoured of a strange 
woman. Even this does not shake her faith. 
She refuses to believe the treachery of Lanceor. 
After Arielle has departed, in a scene of singu- 
lar power he drives forth his patient Griselidis. 
It is almost brutal in its intensity. 

In Act III Arielle bids Merlin leave Lanceor 
and seize Joyzelle for himself, — a genuine 
subconscious suggestion this ! In the security 
of her wonderful love he may find safety 
from that Viviane, who later saps his soul in 
the old-world wood of Broceliande. Joyzelle 
is proof against the most insidious temptations, 
and in the trial by faith she emerges trium- 
phantly. Merlin suddenly commands her to look 
around, and she will see Lanceor held captive in 
the arms of another. She moves away without 
turning her head, thus averting the fate of a 
second Lot's wife. The spectator, drugged by 
this time, begins to wonder if this paragon has 
an Achilles heel. Merlin is quite as envious, 
for in the next trial he causes Lanceor — poor 
Lanceor ! — to be brought nigh death's door, 
and Joyzelle, rendered desperate, throws herself 
at the cruel parent's feet. She promises to fulfil 
any condition he may see fit in his caprice to 
impose. Impose one he does. If Lanceor is 
restored to health, will she become Merlin's bride 
420 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

instead of the son's ? This, it must be admitted, 
is a very ingenious form of torture, and yet, when 
in the bigness of her soul Joyzelle acquiesces, 
we feel that another bead has been touched in 
this rosary of pain. 

How to extricate the girl from her grave posi- 
tion ? Lanceor's good looks have been spoiled 
by his illness — a mere trifle for this insatiable 
creature. In the last act Merlin lies sleeping, 
Arielle on guard. Joyzelle approaches, her face 
set in despair, yet firm in her purpose to fulfil 
her destiny. She has promised. Lanceor has 
been saved. She will pay. As she reaches the 
couch of the magician she plucks forth a dagger 
and would have bloody murder. This is the 
supreme test — rather a disquieting doctrine to 
the passivists and gentle persons who feed on 
Maeterlinck's balmy philosophies. Love that 
does not flinch at crime is the keystone to this 
little arch of a play. Merlin is satisfied. Joyzelle 
has undergone his tests. She is the perfect 
woman for Lanceor's perfect love. The two are 
united, and the lovely landscape fades from our 
view like the misty pictures in a Chopin Ballade. 

Ideal love is the motive of this new play, love 
that will march to the jaws of hell, if needs be, 
for the beloved one ; Orpheus and Eurydice, Hero 
and Leander, or any other enamoured couple 
come to your memory as the ingenuous Joyzelle, 
who has not a faint trace of humour in her, pro- 
ceeds gravely to the unpleasant tasks set her by 
Merlin. I could not help recalling that Princess 
421 



ICONOCLASTS 

Istar, — set to music by d'Indy, — who goes down 
into Hades and at each of its seven gates casts 
away a part of her belongings. At the seventh 
and last gate she has remaining only her naked- 
ness. Maeterlinck removes leaf after leaf from 
the flower-like soul of Joyzelle until its very core 
is reached. 

While she bears a sisterly resemblance to 
many of his naive infantile women, she is nearer 
related to Monna Vanna in her affirmative na- 
ture. She is very full-blooded for a dream 
maiden, and at times she showed something of 
Sardou's tigress-like creatures. Possibly one 
received this impression because Georgette 
Leblanc, who originated the title role, has evi- 
dently been a close student of Sarah Bernhardt's 
methods. As is the case with modern feministe 
writers — were there ever ancient ones? — the 
woman is enthroned, she is the Eternal Womanly, 
and she has the final word in the destiny of 
things, as in Goethe's poem. Lanceor does not 
appear in an undesirable light, while Merlin 
represents Wisdom and makes very Maeter- 
linckian speeches. His final words are full of 
the sober dignity we expect from the author of 
Wisdom and Destiny. 

In Joyzelle the words count for something, no 
matter what the author intends them to convey 
by the " second intention." He once wrote 
'* Les hommes ont je ne sais quelle peur etrange 
de la beaute." This strange fear the young 
Belgian Merlin evokes of his own accord. Wp 
422 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

sense the beauty, but are uncomfortable in its 
presence. Human beings or semi-humans must 
act to reveal themselves. This they do in Joy- 
zelle. There can be no reproach here of the 
abuse of the " static," only the action and words 
— couched in harmonious prose — do not quite 
summon reality to us. 

The disembodied thoughts of the poet £re 
given a local habitation and a name, and still 
they remain thoughts, abstractions; they are 
not of our flesh and blood, but seem to inhabit 
that " Third Kingdom " Ibsen has foretold. 
More " interior " than Monna Vanna, Joyzelle 
is hardly apt to be appreciated. I feel quite 
sure that many of the adjectives lavished upon it 
by the Parisian press were not sincere. As a 
race the French cannot be in sympathy with the 
gray, slow, poetic images of this Belgian mystic. 

I had read Walkley's capital book on Dra- 
matic Criticism, and after the performance of Joy- 
zelle I opened its pages and saw this : " So, says 
Coleridge, stage presentations are to produce a 
sort of temporary half faith, which the spectator 
encourages in himself and supports by a volun- 
tary contribution on his own part, because he 
knows that it is at all times in his power to see 
the thing as it really is. Thus the true stage 
illusion as to a forest scene consists — not in the 
mind's judging it to be a forest, but in its remis- 
sion of the judgment that it is not a forest." 

Joyzelle, then, would be the negation of the 
drama did we not allow for Coleridge's "remis- 
423 



ICONOCLASTS 

sion." If we can shut our eyes to the pure 
idealism of Arielle, and see, as the poet intends 
us to do, a little love tale, our enjoyment would 
be materially heightened. Theories hamper; 
so does criticism. And the unhappiest critic 
of the drama is he who approaches his author 
consciously. As in music, so in much of the 
Maeterlinckian drama, nothing happens, and if 
we could be content to abandon ourselves on the 
waves of the dramatist's fantasy, our pleasure 
would be tenfold enhanced. This is the attitude 
in which one receives music. Why not adopt 
its receptivity in Maeterlinck's case? for his 
plays are as near the inarticulateness of music 
as they dare to be and still retain sober 
lineaments. 

The performance was a delight throughout. 
Every person in the cast is an artist, and as Joy- 
zelle I had an excellent opportunity to study the 
personality and art of Georgette Leblanc, — now 
Mme. Maeterlinck, — for whom Monna Vanna 
was written. A versatile woman, Leblanc was 
originally in opera. She has sung Thais, Sapho, 
Navarraise, Carmen, Francoise in L'Attaque au 
Moulin, the Bruneau-Zola music drama, and has 
played over Europe with unbounded success 
Charlotte Corday and Monna Vanna. As an 
interpreter of the lieder literature of Schumann, 
Schubert, Brahms, and the new Frenchmen and 
Belgians, Gabriel Faure, d'lndy, Claude Debussy, 
Georgette Leblanc has also won praise. And 
her voice was never a great one. She has sung 
424 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

by the grace of God, as our German brethren 
say, and as a diseuse she has won more success 
than as a singer. She is distinctly a personality. 
Her hair is wonderfully red, the mask of her 
face a peculiarly expressive one. You recall 
those old portraits by the masters, of some un- 
known woman, whose eyes follow you from the 
canvas, eyes that peer beneath tumbled tresses, 
surmounted by an imperial Gainsborough hat of 
velvet She is given to the picturesque in daily 
life, and has written a clever volume of essays 
all her own in style and idea. 

As an actress, I should say that Leblanc was 
halfway in her methods between Sarah Bern- 
hardt and — Georgette Leblanc. She has great 
facility of speech, is plastic in her poses, in- 
dulges in those serpentine, undulating move- 
ments we have long since recognized as Sarah's 
own. Do not mistake; Mme. Leblanc has a 
pronounced individuality. She is herself. Her 
intonations are her own. But she has such 
velocity and clarity of diction, has such tempera- 
mental energy, plays a role with such swiftness, 
that Bernhardt is inevitably suggested. As 
Monna Vanna she is more successful than as 
Joyzelle. The abundant nervous energy of the 
woman ill brooks long periods of repose, and 
Joyzelle is more like a Burne-Jones maiden than 
the fiery lover of Prinzevalle. Leblanc was in- 
tense in all the climaxes, and her denotements 
of joy, love, hatred, and overwhelming desola- 
tion were alike admirable. She has expressive 
425 




ICONOCLASTS 

features, though they are irregular — few women 
would call her good-looking. (Note the discrimi- 
nation of sex !) She nevertheless made a charm- 
ing Joyzelle, and spoke her husband's cadenced 
lines with the exact feeling for their exquisite 
rhythms. 

VII 

Experience of a saddening sort taught me 
that a man and his works are twain ; that a 
poet never looks like a poet; a composer is 
seldom harmonious in private life. Yet I could 
not be but tempted when a brief, courteous note 
from the author of Monna Vanna informed me 
that he would give me an evening hour for an 
informal interview. Maeterlinck lives on the 
Rue Reynouard in a small house, the garden of 
which overlooks the Seine from the moderate 
heights of Passy. To reach his apartments I 
had to traverse a twisted courtyard, several 
mysterious staircases built on the corkscrew 
model, and finally was ushered into an ante- 
chamber full of screens, old engravings, fans, 
much ornamental brass, and reproductions of 
Mantegna, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and other 
symbolistic painters. 

But I was not to abide there long. A maid 
with doubting eyes piloted me across a narrow 
hallway, through a room where sat a tirewoman 
altering theatrical costumes — and at last I was 
not in M. Maeterlinck's presence. Not yet 
426 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

Down another staircase, and the great man 
loomed up in cycling costume, cordial, grave, 
a handsome fellow with big, Flemish bones, 
a small, round head, and wavy hair dappling at 
the temples. A man past forty, a gentle, pen- 
sive sort of man, Maurice Maeterlinck does not 
look like his photographs for the reason that 
they were taken nearly a decade ago. He is 
much older, much more vigorous, than I pic- 
tured him. The general race characteristics 
are Flemish or Belgian — that is, Germanic 
and not Gallic. This he knows well and realizes 
that his work must ever be exotic to the logical 
mind of the Frenchman, for whom the form is 
ever paramount to the idea. 

Maeterlinck's eyes are what the French call 
flowers of the head. A gray blue, with hints of 
green, they are melancholy eyes, these, with long, 
dark lashes. He is extremely modest, even diffi- 
dent, though touch him on his favourite theme 
and he responds readily. A devourer of Eng- 
lish literature, he will not venture into conversa- 
tion in our tongue, for he has had little practice. 
German he speaks, and he knows Italian. He 
told me that in composing Monna Vanna, he 
read Sismondi for a year so as to get historical 
colour. He was quite frank about the concep- 
tion of this play. 

" I wrote it for Mme. Maeterlinck," he re- 
marked simply, which disposed of my theory 
that the piece was written to prove he knew 
how to make a drama on conventional lines. 
4*7 



ICONOCLASTS 

Joyzelle was also written for the same actress, 
a woman who has played an important role in 
the poet's life. Then I brought up Browning's 
Luria and the opinion of Professor Phelps of 
Yale that Maeterlinck had profited by reading 
the English poet when he composed Monna 
Vanna. M. Maeterlinck smiled. 

" Naturally I read Browning ; who does not ? " 
he said, with the na'fve intonation that becomes 
him so well. " Luria I have known for a long 
time, but Luria is not a stage play ; " which, 
coming from the author of Les Aveugles, I con- 
sidered sublime. He is quite right — Monna 
Vanna and Luria have little in common except 
that the scenes of both are laid at Pisa, and that 
both Luria and Prinzevalle were treated badly 
by an ungrateful country. But then, so was 
Coriolanus and a host of other historical patriots. 
Maeterlinck spoke of Shakespeare as other men 
mention their deity. He knows Poe very well, 
and also Walt Whitman. 

A study of Maeterlinck's art reveals the evolu- 
tion of a mystic, the creation of a dream thea- 
tre, the master of a mystic positivism. In Edgar 
Quinet's romance, Merlin, we read of a visit made 
by the magician to Prester John at his abbey. 
This abbey is an astounding conglomeration of 
architectures — pagoda, mosque, basilica, Greek 
temple, synagogue, cathedral, Byzantine and 
Gothic chapels, turrets, minarets, and towers in 
bewildering array. Prester John is a venerable 
man with a long, white beard. " Upon his head 
428 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

he wore a turban enriched with a sapphire cross 
At his neck hung a golden crescent, and he sup- 
ported himself upon a staff after the manner of 
a Brahman. Three children followed him, who 
carried each upon the breast an open book. 
The first was the collection of the Vedas, the 
second was the Bible, the third the Koran. At 
certain moments Prester John stopped and read 
a few lines from one of the sacred volumes; 
after which he continued his walk, his eyes 
fixed upon the stars." 

Maurice Maeterlinck recalls this type of eclec- 
tic culture. Eclectic is his taste in creeds and 
cultures. And in this he is the true man of the 
twentieth century, summing up in himself the 
depths and shallows, virtues and defects, of 
Cultured eclecticism. 



429 



The greater part of the foregoing essays, now com- 
pletely revised, first appeared in the columns of the 
New York Sun at the time the author was dra- 
matic editor of that journal. He wishes to acknow 
ledge here the courtesy of William M. Laffan, Esq.. 
in the matter of their republication. 



430 



BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER 



What some distinguished writers^have said of 
them : 

Maurice Maeterlinck wrote, May 15, 1905: "Do 
you know that * Iconoclasts ' is the only book of high 
and universal critical worth that we have had for 
years — to be precise, since Georg Brandes. It is at 
once strong and fine, supple and firm, indulgent and 
sure." 

And of "Ivory Apes and Peacocks" he said, among 
other things: "I have marvelled at the vigilance and 
clarity with which you follow and judge the new liter- 
ary and artistic movements in all countries. I do not 
know of criticism more pure and sure than yours." 
(October, 1915.) 

"The Mercure de France translated the other day 
from Scribner's one of the best studies which have been 
written on Stendhal for a long time, in which there was 
no evasion of the question of Stendhal's immorality. 
The author of that article, James Huneker, is, among 
foreign critics, the one best acquainted with French 
literature and the one who judges us with the greatest 
sympathy and with the most freedom. He has pro- 
tested with force in numerous American journals 
against the campaign of defamation against France and 
he has easily proved that those who participate in it 
are ignorant and fanatical." — "Promenades Litteraires" 
(Troisieme Serie), Remy de Gourmont. (Translated by 
Burton Rascoe for the Chicago Tribune.) 



Paul Bourget wrote, Lundi de Paques, i$C£, or 
"Egoists": "I have browsed through the pages of 
your book and found that you touch in a sympathetic 
style on diverse problems, artistic and literary. In the 
case of Stendhal your catholicity of treatmen. is ex- 
tremely rare and courageous." 



Dr. Georg Brandes, the versatile and profound 
Danish critic, wrote: "I find your breadth of view 
and its expression more European than American; but 
the essential thing is that you are an artist to your very 
marrow." 



BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER 

LETTERS OF 
JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER 

These letters have all the brilliance of his essays, but a greater 
spontaneity and if possible a more vivid spirit. 

Among the people to whom they are written are Royal Cortis- 
soz, Henry Cabot Lodge, Richard Aldrich, H. E. Krehbiel, Ben- 
jamin de Casseres, W. C. Brownell, Walter Pritchard Eaton, William 
Marion Reedy, Mrs. Gilbert, Elizabeth Jordan, Frida Ashforth, 
Emma Eames, the Marquise de Lanza, Henry James, Jr., Henry 
L. MeDcken, etc. 

Every page is alive with pointed comment, brilliant character- 
ization, and vivid portraiture. Bohemian and literary New York 
of the last several decades is mirrored in these letters. 



VARIATIONS 

"Hold your breath as you go through this book — touring the 
universe with a man who takes all of life in its everlasting fecundity 
and efflorescence for his theme." 

— Benjamin de Casseres, in the New York Herald. 



STEEPLEJACK 



ILLUSTRATED 



"Not on'y interesting because of its record of Mr. Huneker's 
career and philosophy, but because it gives an excellent idea of the 
developments in art, music, and literature, both in Europe and in 
Arrerica, du:ing the last forty years." 

— William Lyon Phelps, Yale University. 



BEDOUINS 



Mary Garden; Debussy; Chopin or the Circus; Botticelli; Poe; 
Brahmsody; Anatole France; Mirbeau; Caruso on Wheels; Calico 
Cats; the Artistic Temperament; Idols and Ambergris; With the 
Supreme Sin; Grindstones; A Masque of Music : and The Vision 
Malefic. 



IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS 

"His critical tact is well-nigh infallible. . . . His position among 
writers on aesthetics is anomalous and incredible: no merchant 
traffics in his heart, yet he commands a large, an eager, an affec- 
tionate public." 
— Lawrence Gilman, in North American Review (October, 191 5 )• 



BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER 



UNICORNS 

"The essays are short, full of a satisfying — and fascinating — 
crispness, both memorable and delightful. And they are full of 
fancy, too, of the gayest humor, the quickest appreciation, the 
gentlest sympathy, sometimes of an enchanting extravagance." 

— New York Times. 



MELOMANIACS 

"It would be difficult to sum up ' Melomaniacs ' in a phrase. 
Never did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater con- 
trasts, not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and 
obscurity." 
— Harold E. Gorst, in London Saturday Review (Dec. 8, 1906). 



VISIONARIES 

"In 'The Spiral Road' and in some of the other stories both fan- 
tasy and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most 
unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has 
cast off his neritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds 
no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering, and unblessed. 
But Hawthorne's splendor of vision and his power of sympathy with 
a tormented mind do live again in the best of Mr. Huneker's stories." 
— London Academy ^Feb. 3, 1906). 



ICONOCLASTS: 

A Book of Dramatists 

"His style is a little jerky, but it is one of those rare styles in which 
we are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every sentence." 
— G. K. Chesterton, in London Daiby News. 



MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN 
MUSIC 

"Mr. Huneker is, in the best sense, a critic; he listens to the 
music and gives you his impressions as rapidly and in as few words 
as possible; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping 
strokes with a magnificent disregard for unimportant details. And 
as Mr. Huneker is, as I have said, a powerful personality, a man of 
quick brain and an energetic imagination, a man of moods and tem- 
perament — a string that vibrates and sings in response to music — 
we get in these essays of bis a distinctly original and very valuable 
contribution to the world's tiny musical literature." 

— J. F. Runciman, in London Saturday Review. 



BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER 



NEW COSMOPOLIS 

"Mr. James Huneker, critic of music in the first place, is a crafts- 
man of diverse accomplishment who occupies a distinctive and 
distinguished place among present-day American essayists. He 
is intensely 'modern,' well read in recent European writers, and not 
lacking sympathy with the more rebellious spirits. He flings 
off his impressions at fervent heat; he is not ashamed to be enthusi- 
astic; and he cannot escape that large sentimentality which, to less 
disciplined transatlantic writers, is known nakedly as 'heart 
interest.' Out of his chaos of reading and observation he has, 
however, evolved a criticism of life that makes for intellectual 
cultivation, although it is of a Bohemian rather than an academic 
kind." — London Alhenaum (November 6, 191 5). 



FRANZ LISZT 

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS 



CHOPIN : The Man and His Music 



OVERTONES : 

A Book of Temperaments 

WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF RICHARD STRAUSS 

"In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most 
brilliant of all living writers on matters musical." 

— Academy, London. 

THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE 

A Book of a Thousand and One Moments 

"The book is stimulating; brilliant even with an unexpected 
brilliancy." — Chicago Tribune. 



PROMENADES OF AN 
IMPRESSIONIST 

"We like best such sober essays as those which analyze for us 
the technical contributions of Cezanne and Rodin. Here Mr. 
Huneker is a real interpreter, and here his long experience of men 
and ways in art counts for much. Charming, in the slighter vein, 
are such appreciations as the Monticelli and Chardin." — Frank 
Jewett Mather, Jr., in New York Nation and Evening Post. 

EGOISTS 

WITH PORTRAIT AND FACSIMILE REPRODUCTIONS 

"Closely and yet lightly written, full of facts, yet as amusing as 
a bit of discursive talk, penetrating, candid, and very shrewd." 
— Royal Cortissoz. in the New York Tribune. 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK 



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